Episode 688 - Dweezil Zappa
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuck wads?
Marc:I don't know if that's a good one.
Marc:I don't know if that's a positive thing.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:By the way, my guest is Dweezil Zappa.
Marc:Dweezil Zappa.
Marc:Son of Frank and Gail, brother of Moon, Diva and Amit.
Marc:Dweezil Zappa, the guitar player of the bunch.
Marc:Dweezil Zappa, the true legacy of his father's fingers.
Marc:Yeah, I talked to Dweezil.
Marc:And many of you who've listened to this show for years know I dated Moon for a little while.
Marc:Didn't really end well, but that was not a topic.
Marc: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.
Marc:There are family things I could talk about, but I chose to keep it on guitar and Dweezil and Frank.
Marc: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.
Marc:Frank was a big supporter of comedy as well.
Marc:He was a cutting-edge motherfucker in his day, carved his own way to the point where
Marc:He's got so much stuff and there's so much genius to it.
Marc:You got to be a special type of nerd to fully wrap your brain around the Frank Zappa thing.
Marc:And I'm still taking it in.
Marc:Like right before I started Dating Moon back in the day, I started getting into Zappa and I had a brief foray into that world.
Marc:I was able to see the original studio and stuff.
Marc:But, you know, where do you even start?
Marc:The funny thing is Zappa connects to Beefheart.
Marc:Beefheart connects to Howlin' Wolf.
Marc:Howlin' Wolf directly connects to Hubert Sumlin, his guitar player.
Marc:And this is a roundabout way of me saying that I did this voiceover for a documentary.
Marc:side men 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 side men 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
Marc:That's who it's about, three sidemen, three blue sidemen.
Marc:It's about Hubert Sumlin, Pinetop Perkins, and Willie Big Eye Smith.
Marc:The film basically captures the last three years and the lives of all those guys.
Marc:They died within eight months of each other.
Marc:Hubert Sumlin played behind Howlin' Wolf.
Marc:Pinetop and Willie were in Muddy Waters Band.
Marc:The guys did a nice job with this.
Marc:The fellas, the fellas that made the movie
Marc:Scott Rosenbaum and his crew has a lot of guest appearances in it.
Marc:Joe Perry's in it.
Marc:Elvin Bishop.
Marc:Joe Bonamassa, the guitar player.
Marc:Sugar Blue.
Marc:Robin Ford.
Marc:Guy Davis.
Marc:They talk to what?
Marc:Robbie Krieger.
Marc:John Landis talks.
Marc:Bonnie Raitt.
Marc:Susan Tedeschi.
Marc:Derek Trucks.
Marc:Brad Whitford from Aerosmith as well.
Marc:These are all people talking about Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Willie Smith.
Marc:You know, it's these kind of movies.
Marc: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.
Marc:These were lives, man.
Marc:Fucking lives lived, and these guys defined something.
Marc:If you think about Howlin' Wolf, if you think about Hubert Sully, think about Muddy Waters, there'd be no rock and roll without these guys.
Marc:I know I sound like just a dumb old guy, but you can go directly... I guess my point was...
Marc:directly from Howlin' Wolf to Captain Beefheart, who was basically a psychedelic Howlin' Wolf who then deconstructed everything, music itself, and created something different.
Marc:And the relationship between Zappa and Beefheart was formative certainly for Zappa.
Marc:And that gets us the dweezil.
Marc:But nonetheless...
Marc:The movie is great.
Marc:It's a great doc.
Marc:There's a lot of good people in it.
Marc:It's about some amazing musicians, and it premieres tomorrow, Friday, March 11th at South by Southwest, and there'll be screenings all week.
Marc:I was trying to remember when I first took in the blues.
Marc: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.
Marc:I don't know why that is.
Marc:I've been trying to think about that.
Marc: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 a particular performer.
Marc:I don't know what it was that resonated with me early on.
Marc:It was just a thing.
Marc:Either you're wired for it or you're not.
Marc:And when I learned that three chord blues or that... That fucking... I was one of the first things I learned on guitar and I was like, this is the key to everything.
Marc:And I'm not saying that isn't true.
Marc:But then 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,
Thank you.
Marc:Muddy Waters, Roland and Tumbling Blues.
Marc:Until you were able to make that thing your own and find your voice in that song, you weren't officially a blues man.
Marc:It was just this theory I had.
Marc:So I spent years trying to make myself my own version of Roland and Tumbling because I thought that there was some sort of depth of moral turpitude and pain in that song that has to do with broken hearts and also about just the existential thing that
Marc:of like, you know, just being alive and knowing it.
Marc:And I just thought that was the song.
Marc:That was some sort of Rosetta Stone.
Marc:But I just became sort of obsessed.
Marc:And then you sort of hear this Robert Johnson business.
Marc: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 and the heart of all modern blues.
Marc:First time you listen to that record, you're like, I can't even understand it.
Marc:It's like it's too crackly.
Marc:What's so great about this?
Marc: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 something that you can find within yourself.
Marc:It's no easy task.
Marc:Now I got Dweezo on today.
Marc:And Dweezil's fucking a wizard on the guitar.
Marc:It's his birthright in a way.
Marc:But I can't ever get to a level where I can even understand what the hell he's doing.
Marc:And 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.
Marc:But I have not got a brain that's going to do that kind of work on anything.
Marc:That does not desire to have that much control of the creativity.
Marc:But I'm impressed by it.
Marc:You ever listen?
Marc:Frank Zappa could fucking play guitar like crazy, man.
Marc:And all his stuff and all the orchestrations.
Marc:And then Dweezil's got this new record out.
Marc:That is sort of a personal journey for him.
Marc:It's called Via Zamata.
Marc:You can get that wherever you get music.
Marc:He's got tour dates coming up around the country.
Marc:You can go to dweezilzappaworld.com for tickets.
Marc:This is me and Dweezil Zappa.
Marc:What kind of guitar did you come in here with?
Guest:I have a guitar that is basically like a 335, but it's the Trini Lopez model.
Guest:So it has a different headstock on it and just a couple of things.
Guest:But it's...
Guest: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 did you that's the one you played on uh like there i thought it was almost like a classical guitar there's one cut on that record that sounds like a spanish guitar almost
Guest:Well, there is some Spanish guitar on one part of a song called Truth.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you're playing that?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Do you do much acoustic shit?
Guest:You know, I play acoustic guitar.
Guest:I don't have that many acoustic guitars.
Guest:I think I have maybe two acoustic guitars.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I love the sound of them, but...
Guest:the real problem for me with acoustic guitars is they always typically have heavier strings.
Guest:Right.
Guest:My fingers don't callous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the heavy strings just tear me up.
Marc:What do you mean they don't callous?
Guest:I, I play, look, I, I play like hours every day.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I just felt his fingers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, and they just, uh, that's as, as callous as they get.
Guest:So if I take a shower like too soon before a show, it's like my, my fingers will just, the skin will rip right off of that.
Marc:That's bizarre, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Isn't it?
Guest:Is that your cross to bear as a guitar player?
Guest:It is.
Guest:It's like, why can't I get the hard leather tips?
Guest:Yeah, it doesn't even matter.
Guest:I mean, I could play 12 hours a day, and it doesn't do anything.
Guest:That's fucking weird, man.
Marc:You still practice how many times a day?
Guest:Well, I play a lot.
Guest:I mean, lately, for the new tour that we're setting up for, I'm playing probably eight hours a day, something like that.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Well, like, when I dated your sister briefly, it was funny because she said that when she was growing up, all she heard from your room was... Over and over and over.
Guest:Yeah, well, I mean, the thing was, when I started playing guitar, I mean, I always...
Guest:appreciated my father's playing and music but I knew even from knowing uh very little about music at at at the age of 12 uh that that stuff was something that was really hard and I would have to I would have to know stuff you know so I had to start somewhere else but I started with uh I got really inspired by Edward Van Halen and Randy Rhodes yeah
Guest:So, I mean, we're talking about 1981, 82.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And at that time, the most popular music in the world was hard rock.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:With those big guitar players.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was really inspired by the sound and the stuff that they were doing.
Guest:And so I started to try to learn all that stuff.
Guest:And of course, to most people, it just sounds like Beatle, Beatle, Beatle, because there's a lot of notes involved in practicing.
Guest:But did you do scales and shit?
Guest: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
Marc:So you were just a kid sitting around with a guitar, like kind of hungry looking?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Frank's like, yeah, go show that kid a few things.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And then nine months later, I recorded the very first thing that I ever put out, which was called My Mother is a Space Cadet.
Guest:And it was produced by Eddie Van Halen.
Guest: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,
Guest:and ended up coming over like 20 minutes later.
Marc:He didn't have a relationship with you or your dad before that?
Guest:He called the house.
Guest:So you got to imagine, nowadays it's ubiquitous to know about any celebrity through any tweet.
Guest:You know what they had for breakfast or whatever.
Guest:But in that time frame, in the early 80s,
Guest:There was magazines like Cream or... Yeah, Crawdaddy and Guitar Player.
Guest:Or even Hit Parade and stuff like that.
Guest:That was the only place you saw pictures of musicians outside of what they were doing in the studio or on stage.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:So you had to just imagine what these people must be like.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I didn't even know what he sounded like.
Marc:Although you grew up in a recording studio, kind of.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the thing is, to know anything about a celebrity like Eddie Van Halen, there was no MTV Cribs.
Guest:There was nothing like that.
Guest:So you would buy a record and you would listen and you would imagine all these things about, how did these people make this?
Guest:But so then some guy calls and says he's Eddie Van Halen.
Guest:So we have no way to verify, but then he shows up.
Guest:And sure enough, it's him.
Guest:And how old are you?
Guest:12.
Guest:12.
Guest:And so the thing that was so cool was- How did he know to reach out to you?
Guest:Because you had said publicly somewhere that- No, he wasn't reaching out to me.
Guest:He reached out to Frank.
Guest:He wanted to meet Frank and I guess talk about some music or something.
Guest:But what happened was, you know, 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, right?
Guest:You know, 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?
Guest:I mean, it was like a bona fide superhero walking into the house.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:So for me, it was the coolest thing.
Guest:He shows up, he's got this guitar.
Guest:It was a purple Stratocaster-shaped guitar, but it had tape over the headstock.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because he was just at that time starting to work with Kramer.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:Okay, right.
Guest:He wasn't plugging any name of anything.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So anyway, he plugs this guitar in, and I immediately want to know, how do you play Mean Street?
Guest:How do you play Eruption?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I got to see from two feet away... Yeah, yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:Because there's a lot of trial and error when you learn things from a record.
Guest:You have to try to figure out, okay, well...
Guest:I can hear the notes work here, but they can also work at this point.
Marc:Right, where's he playing and how is the easiest way to get there?
Guest: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.
Marc:Right, and you were spending like nine hours...
Guest:yeah yeah and he did then they just show up and you're like oh fuck yeah not like it was ever easy right i mean yeah yeah you know to play eruption or play any of his songs and play them uh with the the level of skill commensurate with his ability yes is you know that's that's a lifetime's worth of work yeah do you still have a relationship with him
Guest:Yeah, I see them every now and again.
Guest:We were rehearsing in a room right next to them when they were getting ready for their last tour and stuff.
Marc:With David?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:What did you hear, yelling or playing?
Guest:I mean, they actually were running the set that they were getting ready for that Kimmel show in Hollywood.
Guest:So they were running that set, and they were sounding good.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's Van Halen.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:I 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 remet your sister I'd started amassing vinyl so I could there was part of me that was always like you know like well I got to wrap my brain around this shit.
Marc:I mean, I have to reckon with Zappa at some point.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc: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 personal and not just professional.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, I've been doing Zappa plays Zappa for 10 years right now.
Guest:It's been a huge part of my life and my musical experience.
Guest:I mean, it was a training ground for a lot of things.
Guest:But what started it was after Frank passed, there was this sort of relegation of his music to this novelty file.
Guest:In American culture?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Because of the five or six hits that were funny songs?
Guest:And in a way, I can understand that if the only thing you've ever heard on the radio from him is...
Marc:Sheik Your Booty or Don't Eat the Yellow Snow or Valley Girl or whatever.
Guest:Then you think, oh, yeah, he's the guy with the silly, jokey songs or whatever.
Guest:But he made over 80 albums in his lifetime.
Guest:80 records.
Guest:Yeah, sometimes five albums a year.
Guest:Did your parents ever talk?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I picture he's like, I'm going downstairs.
Guest:Well, you know what's so crazy is he works so fast.
Guest: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.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And he obviously loved to play.
Guest:Yeah, but I mean, the level of quality that went into the details of the recording, the writing, the arranging, all that stuff, you know, it's astonishing when you really try to pay attention to how he did what he did.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's unrivaled anywhere in the world of music.
Marc:What was the first stuff like?
Marc:Well, let's go back a little bit.
Marc:So how old are you?
Marc:You're my age?
Marc:I'm 46.
Marc:Oh, you're 46?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:So you're younger than me.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:so i'm 52 but like what do you like 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 and 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 um
Guest: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.
Guest:You know, this was like a business.
Guest:There was a time clock?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, you know, I mean, so the thing is...
Guest:Growing up, there weren't a lot of people.
Guest:I tell the story that Eddie Van Halen showed up just out of the blue, but we didn't have much of that.
Guest:There wasn't a lot of just different musicians stopping by.
Marc:But what about by that time, was Beefheart and your dad still friends?
Guest:Yeah, but he wasn't really around the house much.
Guest:He would call occasionally, and you'd have experiences as a kid answering the phone, and there'd be some guy that would sound like...
Guest:And I say, yeah.
Guest:I've got a platypus in my briefcase.
Guest:And then basically as a kid, you already just go, hold on.
Guest:And you're like, Dad, Captain Beefheart's on the phone.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So it wasn't like this grand central of musicians coming out.
Guest:There were sessions.
Guest:Yeah, and it was serious.
Guest:I mean, Frank, he wasn't...
Guest: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 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
Guest:uh i mean he was sitting still in his chair while he was composing but 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 uh he was waking up uh you know everybody was basically going to sleep you know so uh
Guest:It was because he could get more done when everybody was asleep and it was quiet in the house.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:And I guess most of you just sort of revolved around his schedule on some level.
Guest:It just became normal.
Marc:And eventually you guys just sort of had your own lives.
Guest:Well, you know, we would have dinner.
Guest:His would be breakfast and ours would be dinner.
Guest:You know, it was just that kind of stuff.
Guest:80 records.
Guest:Yeah, well, I mean, it's really wild when you think about there were about three or four times in the 70s where he made five albums in one year.
Guest:And one time it was specifically on purpose because he did it to get out of a record deal.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which had never been done before.
Guest:You know, it was the most audacious thing ever.
Guest:You know, he wasn't enjoying how the record deal was working.
Guest:So he turned in five albums all at once.
Guest:And said, I'm done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they said, you can't do that.
Guest:And he said, I just did.
Guest:And it turned into a lawsuit, which he won.
Guest:Were they good records?
Guest:Yeah, they were all good records.
Guest:But the thing about it is the...
Guest:The industry changed because of that.
Guest:Then contracts were written so that that could never happen again.
Marc:So they had to tear them out over the years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Marc:And they owned you.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But Frank, for people that don't know, he owned all of his master recordings, which is also unheard of.
Marc:He went out of his way to do that.
Marc:And he also produced early on.
Marc:He found some bands.
Marc:Was it through Fantasy?
Marc:I can't remember.
Guest:Well, he did a couple of things with some people, but he wasn't doing a lot of that.
Guest:He helped Alice Cooper.
Guest:He produced a record from Grand Funk Railroad.
Guest:He did a couple of little things.
Guest:He helped out George Duke.
Marc:So what, in terms of your sort of growing up as a guitar player, because you put out your first whole record, what year was that?
Guest:I think it was 1986, and I was 15 when I made the record, but it came out when I was 16.
Marc:And was the dream, because I know that you and your brother did a show, and you kind of acted here and there, and I don't know, I think you and Moon had some shit going on, but what was the goal?
Marc:When did it become all about musicians?
Guest:I 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.
Guest:You actually had difficulty getting work if you played well.
Guest:Were you doing studio work?
Guest:No.
Guest:I was doing stuff... I mean, I've played on a lot of people's records over the years, but what I was starting to get into at that time was getting into film score type stuff.
Guest:But that was the one time really in the sort of early to middle 90s where...
Guest:I just got sort of disillusioned by what music would be or could be because I had learned to be a rock guitar player that now that was the last thing anybody ever needed on a record.
Marc:What was going on then?
Marc:Was that...
Guest:Well, it was after Nirvana and all that stuff.
Guest:So it got loose.
Guest:It got to the point where 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.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:It's lowering the bar so much that that it right.
Guest: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.
Guest: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.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So to a certain degree, they have their own personality in that, but it's...
Marc:Well, that's always been the way it's been.
Marc:I mean, the reason why people played rock and roll was it was three fucking chords.
Marc:And it was like, no, you can do that.
Marc:And that was the whole industry, was everybody playing the same goddamn song, right?
Marc:So I think what happened when you were talking about was people actually turned on hair metal.
Marc:It was like this movement against metal.
Guest:Yeah, but I wasn't really about trying to just do only metal music.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that type of rock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, something that still had some... See, basically, I guess... Virtuosity.
Guest:Yeah, that element of it where that is allowed to flourish within the music.
Guest:But see, the thing is, I grew up listening to only what Frank was working on or whatever he was listening to.
Marc:Did he really pipe it through the house?
Guest:Well, no, I mean, it was that was just, you know, it was ubiquitous in the house because if he was downstairs, you hear some noise, you hear whatever.
Guest:But the thing is, it's whatever he was working on or whatever he was listening to in his record collection.
Guest:So it could have been rhythm and blues records or could have been other classical composers like Varese or Stravinsky or it could have been the Bulgarian Women's Choir or could have been anything.
Guest:But we didn't listen to the radio.
Marc:He had a big appetite for any kind of music.
Guest:So I never knew what was on the radio until I was about 12.
Guest:And then when I heard the radio, I said, wait a minute, what's wrong here?
Guest:There's a bunch of stuff missing.
Guest:Where's all the rest of it?
Marc:Where's this Stravinsky on this rock station?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest: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 because that was just what I heard growing up.
Guest:So that...
Guest:That really was a little bit of a thing that throughout my life, you know, when I listen to music, I'm always sort of hoping to be surprised coming around the corner with some other thing that's coming.
Marc:Yeah, well, that's what happens to me when I, you know, if I'll sit down and listen, like even to your record, it seems to me that this new record,
Marc:How do you pronounce it?
Marc:Via Zamata.
Marc:Via Zamata.
Marc: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?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty good way of putting it.
Guest:Because, you know, part of what the idea when I got into the studio to make the record was...
Guest:I had had this experience where I went to Sicily, and we traced our family roots to this little place called Partinico, Sicily, and there was a street called Via Zamata, which is where Frank's family emigrated from.
Guest:There was this one little place.
Marc:How far back, his parents or his grandparents?
Guest:Well, his parents, I believe, actually, were there and came as children to the U.S., but...
Guest:The thing was, you know, we got to go, you see on the back cover here, this number 13.
Guest:It's just this tiny little place.
Guest:I mean, the room we're in right now is maybe a little bigger than this place that was in...
Guest:Parchinico, Sicily, and it had a little post where you could tie up your donkey outside.
Guest:But it's this mountain village.
Guest:So anyway, what I wanted to do was sort of do a musical interpretation of that kind of experience of seeing where everything comes from.
Marc:Where Zappa comes from.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And well, here's the other thing is the name Via Zamata, from what I've been told by the people there in Partinico, is, you know, it's not a common word, but the word is supposed to mean the sound of children's footsteps playing in the rain.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I love when language does that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:English is not that good at that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, it's not.
Guest:And so but then that street got renamed via Frank Zappa.
Guest:The whole town sort of banded together to to create this this thing to honor Frank.
Guest:And so that that little street, which only had a dozen buildings on it, maybe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:um uh you know small little yeah homes 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 right frank's own specialized sound
Guest:But they had their own little military marching band playing some of Frank's music, walking through the streets.
Guest:And it was this really, really cool thing.
Marc:Was that the first time you'd heard Frank's music played by a marching band?
Guest:I had actually seen some marching bands do some pretty wild stuff on the internet.
Guest:But this was cool just because it was local people that are proud to be, in some way, part of this family history thing.
Guest:And they were playing some...
Guest: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 uh you know there's beautiful mountains and all this kind of stuff around and then these old buildings and 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 yeah kind of thing and how did that inform the record really
Guest:Well, what it did was, in a lot of ways, I just tried to take all the elements.
Guest:It's kind of like what you described before.
Guest: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.
Guest:And so it's about layers of details.
Guest:So it could be part of the song or it could be part of the production.
Guest:So, for example...
Guest: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 uh jeff emrick who recorded a lot of the beatles 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 first truth yeah oh yeah class the one with the yeah the spanish guitar
Guest:Yeah, that also has the string quartet and everything.
Marc:And did you... Oh, go ahead.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Guest:Basically, I was just saying that all those kind of layers of details are things that are the fabric of my youth and listening to that kind of stuff that just happens on records and thinking, you know, I love the sound of the strings on Eleanor Rigby.
Guest:Wouldn't it be cool to work with the guy that recorded that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that's what I got a chance to do on that.
Marc:And what was he like?
Guest:He was great.
Guest:He had so many cool stories about how he learned to do what he did.
Guest:Because for people that don't know, I mean, he started when he was 19 working with the Beatles.
Guest:And maybe even earlier, actually.
Guest:But he was doing full...
Guest:you know sessions and producing and all that kind of stuff and uh and i mean he he just he revolutionized uh recording in a lot of ways how old is he now uh like is he really old did where you know i mean i'm gonna guess that he's in his 70s oh yeah but he's all there and
Guest:Yeah, totally great and into it.
Guest:And there's a lot of humor on the record.
Marc:I mean, you did get some of your sense of humor, I think, from Frank.
Marc:There's a couple, the Malkovich song and the Dragon, what is it, Dragon Master?
Guest:Dragon Master is actually the only co-write I ever did with Frank.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, he wrote the lyrics to that song, and then he asked me to write the music to it.
Guest:So he wrote the lyrics in 1988 or somewhere thereabouts.
Guest:And what's so funny is, I mean, it's a completely preposterous song about a Dragon Master.
Guest:Sure.
Guest: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...
Guest:for the ridiculous folk so because because here's well that's what he did right yeah well in a lot of ways yeah but but you know sometimes see i 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 sure 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
Guest:But if you're really into metal, it's going to hit you in a different way.
Guest:There may not be a joke in there.
Guest:Yeah, it's very earnest.
Guest:This is honest metal.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Because the thing about it is there's just little details in it that make me laugh.
Guest:Like there's a lyric that says, hate the day, hate the light.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I got this guy to sing it that has a real metal voice, this guy, Sean Albro.
Guest:And I was explaining to him, I said, okay, on the word light, you have to add an extra syllable to it.
Guest:And he says, what do you mean?
Guest:I said, you know, like, hate the day, hate the light.
Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's like it has to have that, you know, thing.
Guest:He says, oh, yeah, you mean make it cool.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm like, yeah.
Guest:You know, but it's those like it's like a Ronnie James Dio-ism.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so it's but it's it's like finding the way to make all of that kind of stuff happen.
Guest:It's like when you you just have to over enunciate things like the word what is horrible.
Guest:what you know yeah 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 yeah yeah you know no it's great and the uh with the malkovich song what did you what did what where'd that come from
Guest:Well, it's actually John Malkovich.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:They actually staged the photographs.
Guest:With John?
Guest:Yeah, so there's a famous photo of two twin six-year-old girls in these weird dresses.
Guest:I think it's a Diane Arbus.
Marc:Diane Arbus, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he's both of the girls.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:That's hilarious.
Marc:I'd never heard of this.
Guest:Yeah, no, it's a really cool thing.
Guest:So anyway, what he did was he decided he wanted a musical component to it, and he recorded himself reciting Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
Guest:And then he decided, well, let's see if there's some people that could put this to music.
Guest:And so...
Guest:random selection of people got asked to make a soundtrack to his performance.
Guest:So the album that he has, because he's got his own album that has, my song is on that, but it's also on my record.
Guest:But the thing is,
Guest:uh, he, 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.
Guest:So, uh, the, it's Yoko Ono, Rico Kasich, um, uh, and you, well, yeah, Andy Summers.
Guest:I, I did one.
Guest:And then, um, Dolores O'Riordan from the cranberries and a bunch of other people.
Guest:It's a strange, uh, collection of, of people, but, but my version, um,
Guest:Because I have heard, I think, most of the other stuff.
Guest:My version seems to be the only one that is more of like a straightforward song type of arrangement.
Guest:The other stuff seems to be more like a soundtrack that allows John's voice to come in and out and do...
Guest:But I just thought it would be funny to, since it seems that most people won't be familiar with the text that he's reciting, that it would just be funny to ask the question, what the fuck is he talking about?
Guest:And so that's what the chorus became.
Guest:So it's like in the verses, we just let John say his stuff.
Guest:But actually one of the interesting things about the production of it too is that the very first thing that happens in the song
Guest:It's this kind of strange little melody and weird rhythm.
Guest:And what we did was we took John's voice and we used this software that's called Melodyne.
Guest:And you can have it interpret what is happening and you can actually, it will take from that performance, it will extract pitch and rhythm.
Guest:So then you can take that and use MIDI notes and you can actually have something that goes along with the performance.
Guest:But what we did was we extracted the rhythm element.
Guest:And so what his speech pattern that happens is actually creates the fill that starts the song.
Guest:And then it goes naturally into hearing his voice in the cadence that he's speaking.
Guest:Wow.
Guest: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 uh i heard a quote from him saying that uh the chorus of the song asked the question that would be uh appropriate for his tombstone you know what the fuck is he talking about
Guest:Did you deal with him at all?
Guest:That's the funniest part of it.
Guest:I still have never actually met him or spoken with him.
Marc:But he's okay?
Marc:He's okay with everything?
Guest:Apparently he likes the tune.
Guest:But it's a fun song.
Guest:It's one of the tunes that...
Guest: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.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You just locked in?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Straight through?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Why so pressing on that one?
Guest:It just was one of those things where it's just like, let's do this, let's do this, let's do that.
Guest:Oh, we're done.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like on this record...
Marc:I mean, you've got a couple kids.
Guest:I do, yeah.
Marc:Did they go with you to Sicily?
Guest:Actually, my kids have not been, but my niece, Moon's daughter, Matilda, she got to go.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:She got to check it out.
Guest: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 the song On Fire.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So that's pretty fun.
Guest:It's cool to hear the kids just be part of that.
Marc:Well, I think it's great that they all have a relationship, all the cousins.
Marc:It's nice.
Marc:You all live near each other.
Marc:Because a lot of people don't.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I've got cousins where you're like, oh yeah, I met you when I was three.
Marc:How you doing?
Marc:What's up?
Marc:But they're all involved in everyone's lives.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:So let's talk about the evolution of the... Because when I listen to this record,
Marc: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.
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean... And that's not a bad thing.
Marc: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, when I listened to it, 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...
Marc:With a pretty strong satirical disposition to say, you know, fuck you, do popular music on some level.
Guest:I would say that that's always been there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because his M.O.
Guest:was just, I like making music.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And if other people like it, that's great.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that's not... I'm not making music for the masses.
Guest:Basically, he just was... He...
Guest:He's the kind of person that could literally have a blank piece of music paper.
Guest:He could sit on an airplane and go from L.A.
Guest: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, you know.
Marc:That's amazing, right?
Marc:It's totally nuts.
Marc:But I like the way early on that he actually satirized other music.
Marc: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.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, that stuff happened throughout his whole musical career.
Guest:But the thing...
Guest:Two that's so fascinating is that he had a vision of his music as one complete piece of music.
Guest:So all the records that he ever made, to him it was part of one larger project that he called Project Object.
Guest:And he considered it all to be basically one big note.
Guest:And there's this interesting element of surprise where...
Guest:Characters are introduced on records and then they come back and they're having this dialogue from record to record.
Guest:So if you ever listen to the entire catalog, you may find certain characters coming in and out that are answering things that happened on previous records.
Marc:Could be like 10 records ago?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, I mean, he had this this thematic coherence for everything.
Guest:And there was this this grand idea that that nobody really knew about.
Guest:But when you when you really put it all together and you listen in chronological order, you know, it's just mind blowing.
Guest:And it's.
Marc:Because he was sort of a conceptual artist.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He comes from noise music in a way.
Marc:Some of his heroes early on were real conceptual out there dudes, right?
Marc:What's the name of that one guy?
Marc:Varese.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Who had the air raid siren in one of his first big symphonies.
Marc:And that's what blew your old man's mind, that and R&B music.
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, it's just funny because, I mean, as a kid, he just went to the library and taught himself everything about how to become a composer.
Guest:He learned it all on his own terms, completely autodidactic, you know, learning process.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that's why there's no boundaries in his music.
Guest:He'll mix any styles and all kinds of different instrumentation and stuff that other people might have said, well, why would you do that?
Marc:Yeah, he didn't have to answer anybody.
Guest:Yeah, it was, well, why not?
Guest:Why wouldn't I do that?
Marc:And when did you have, like, when your transition as a player from, you know, listening to the technique of Van Halen or even Steve Vai or somebody, when did you begin to sort of intellectually integrate, you know, what your dad was doing?
Marc:When he started playing his shit?
Guest:Well, the thing about it is a lot of it was always something that I intrinsically had some sort of connection to.
Guest:But when I started to learn the music, I studied the music for two years before I put the band together.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, what do you mean studied it?
Guest:Well, because the thing is, I don't have the same background as my dad where he could notate anything.
Guest:You know, I learned everything by ear.
Marc:So he wrote everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I needed to know the names of things.
Guest:I needed to basically...
Guest:go through and understand music theory and harmony so that when I put the band together, I'd actually be able to speak the language that was required to get the point across.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because my idea in putting Zappa plays Zappa together was to...
Guest:emphasized the things that I thought were the most misunderstood or underappreciated things about my dad's music.
Guest:And that's the focus or the emphasis that I wanted to put on the performances.
Marc:And what are those things?
Guest:Well, first, in the first few years, I basically was...
Guest:Staying away from any of the stuff that was humor related.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I wanted to focus on Frank's compositional skills with his classical music and and, you know, some of the other big band arrangements of other things that would.
Guest:would really, like I said, showcase his abilities as a composer and then also as a guitarist because that was sort of an afterthought for people.
Guest:People are like, oh yeah, I guess he plays guitar.
Guest:He's a monster guitar player.
Guest: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...
Guest: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 use the analogy like an orchestra basically is playing
Guest: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.
Guest:We're playing it as the composer wrote this thing.
Guest:So they don't get, you know, they don't say, oh, you know, this music needs an update.
Guest:We need to bring in a rapper and be like, yeah, yeah, Beethoven, yeah, uh-huh, one time.
Guest:You know, they don't...
Guest:that's a different thing yeah they don't they don't but see that's the the common perception is when you want to make something modern you gotta make it hip-hop or you gotta 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 yeah like we're playing it
Guest:the way it is, you know?
Marc:Right.
Marc: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?
Guest:Well, I basically had to completely change everything I knew about how to play guitar.
Guest:How?
Guest:It was like getting a lobotomy and then training for the Olympics.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, because what I... I took over...
Guest:Probably 30 years of guitar playing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, forget that, you know, you train yourself to play a certain way, you know, like a picking style where it's alternate picking.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it becomes natural.
Guest:It's the same as like walking or breathing or something.
Guest: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.
Guest:You have to have hybrid picking.
Guest:You have to have sweet picking.
Guest:You have to have all these things all at once just to get to these things.
Guest:So I had to remap everything about how I visualized the guitar and the physical motion to actually play the guitar.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Wow.
Guest: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.
Guest:And he's like, okay, here's my lick number one.
Guest:He almost made fun of that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so the thing is he was completely extemporaneous when he played.
Guest: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.
Guest:And then attach notes to those through this whole other vocabulary of knowledge of harmonic content and all this stuff.
Guest:So what I had to do was say, well, how am I going to play in context to the music and play in a way that is like what Frank would have approached, but still be able to...
Guest: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
Guest:Yeah, so I had to develop a way to sort of interpolate these ideas with... I would take rhythmic figures that were part of his music, things from the Black Page or things from Echidnas Arf, and I would study those and I would say, okay, he's using some of these rhythms consistently in his music.
Guest:Now, if I take these and I look at them and I say, how many of these...
Guest: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
Guest: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
Guest:And so then you, you have the choice when you're playing, uh, how to, um, how to use those.
Guest: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 data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data.
Guest: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.
Guest:The notes are superfluous.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:And so a lot of his music has these angular lines and stuff that are built around just the rhythm itself.
Guest:And I sort of arrived at this because...
Guest:of the song, The Black Page, which was written as a drum solo, and then he wrote an amazing melody to it months later.
Guest:So it was like, wait, he wrote all the rhythms first, and then he put notes to it.
Marc:So that was your key?
Marc:That was your portal in?
Guest:Yeah, that was how I 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.
Guest:And so when you hear a song like Funky 15 on my record, it has these angular lines, but they're based out of these concepts that I'm telling you about where it's a certain kind of rhythm, but the line just kind of moves through.
Guest:It's the rhythm that keeps it.
Guest:But the line...
Marc: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
Guest:I got to spend a lot of time with him musically doing stuff in the studio or on stage or other things where, you know, I was probably the one person in the family that had a continuous solid interest in music and was able to, you know, develop that kind of relationship with him.
Guest:But, you know, if he was around today, I would have a lot of questions for him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, I mean, now that I've uncovered so many things about how he wrote some of the stuff, I would just really be curious to know how he consistently took the same... I mean, in Western music, there's 12 pitches.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's all you have.
Guest:There's 12 and you can rearrange them any way that you want.
Guest:But it seemed like he had a whole other bag of pitches that nobody else had because he did not repeat the way that he would do things.
Guest:There was no...
Guest:There's no consistent pattern that you could say, oh, this is basically a knockoff of this.
Guest:He never did that in his music.
Guest: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.
Guest:I mean, that's the thing that just blows my mind over 80 albums that he...
Guest: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 uh over and over and over and over do you think he was you know uh an explorer or or a searcher
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Was he looking, you know, was he outside of the work?
Marc:Because it seems like, you know, he had an amazing work ethic and he had a vision for what he was doing.
Marc:Like you said, the object that it was one continuous piece.
Marc:And, you know, I because it doesn't necessarily I don't it doesn't he doesn't feel like a guy that was looking for something.
Marc:He felt like a guy that wanted to create different things all the time.
Guest:I think that it was, I don't even know that it was a choice.
Guest:I think it was just that it just was coming out of him regardless.
Guest:He just had to do it.
Guest:Possessed.
Guest:I mean, possessed by music for sure.
Guest:And how old were you when he passed away?
Guest:You know, I never even think about it, but I was early 20s, so probably like 21 or 22, something like that.
Guest:I mean, I just block that shit out, you know?
Marc:You shut it down?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I never remember when it... I know like 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.
Guest:I never...
Marc: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?
Guest:Well, I mean, it is.
Guest:It's been cathartic in a lot of ways.
Guest:But, you know, like I said, it's still like a continuation for me.
Marc:But do you ever miss him when you're...
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I mean, I've played shows on countless occasions and just broken down while I'm playing.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, because it's rough.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:And people go, oh, well, you should be past that at this point.
Guest:It's like, well, fuck you.
Guest:It's my dad.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And when you did, like, because I saw you do one of the Roxy shows.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and that, like, you know, being in that stuff.
Marc:And you're playing with some of his guys, too.
Marc:It's just, I can't imagine the emotions of it all.
Guest:Well, you know, we had this one thing that we were doing, and we've done it a few times, where we have some footage, some film footage of him that we were able to synchronize so that
Guest: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
Marc:I saw that once.
Marc:I don't want to diminish anything, but I saw them do that at a Beach Boys concert.
Marc:And I was just sort of like, it's like summoning a ghost in a way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And did you feel like you were trading?
Guest: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.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That's part of the Zappa plays Zappa thing.
Guest:Getting it out there?
Guest:Yeah, well, but to give people a chance to see the music in a live situation where they, you know, 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?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And that's kind of... Yeah, it's a real, like, even when you watch, like, I watched You at the Rocks, you do it, and then, like, I've watched some stuff online at him, and it's like, it's massive undertaking.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest: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 to the music obviously a sense of humor too but uh if you were in the band you were required to to know what you were doing or you were gone you
Guest:You know, his his phrase was window or aisle.
Guest:How would you like to return home?
Guest:You know, because, you know, if you weren't cutting it, that's what happened.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc: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.
Marc:It seemed to really come together.
Marc:Is that how you feel about it?
Guest:Uh, yeah, I think, I think it is, you know, cause a lot of people before I made the record were saying, what's your music even going to be like?
Guest:And I said, I have no idea.
Guest:You know, it went into the studio and this is just what happened.
Guest:When was the last time you recorded a record?
Guest:10 years ago.
Marc:No shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so my experience of playing Zappa plays Zappa music all over the world, um, definitely, um, informed what I was going to do on the record.
Guest:But, uh, but what I wanted to do was, um,
Guest:In a lot of ways, this is a more simplified record than anything that I've done before.
Guest:And so that might be unexpected for people because I think the song structure is really... The guitar actually sort of takes a back seat at a lot of...
Guest:in a lot of the record.
Guest:I mean, there's still plenty of guitar on the record.
Guest:But before, when I made a record, if you looked at a picture of a house that's supposed to have music in it, my guitar was sitting on top of the house.
Guest:Now it's just all integrated into that one picture because I've learned to play in an ensemble and have it be where everybody has a specific thing to make the music move forward.
Guest:It's a very different...
Guest:to be able to play as a musician versus a guitar player.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's a maturing thing, I think.
Marc:It's like, you know what I mean?
Marc:You're willing to sort of let it breathe a little bit and not be like, it's me, I'm doing it.
Guest:Well, because there was so much emphasis on guitar when I grew up that that was everything that was, I mean, it was like, that's what you're supposed to do, you know?
Marc: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 got to 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
Guest:Well, you know, I mean, a lot of what you said is true.
Guest:I mean, the thing that's interesting is that we started this, like I said, 10 years ago.
Guest: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.
Guest:And they would have been in their middle 50s up into their late 60s, right?
Guest:These are the people that would have been
Guest:relatively close to Frank's age, maybe a few years older, maybe a few years younger.
Guest:So carry that forward 10 years.
Guest:We don't have 80-year-olds in the audience.
Guest:It's actually going the other way.
Guest:We have a lot more young people and we still have a good amount of people that are in their 50s and 60s that come to this stuff, but we're seeing...
Guest:A lot of younger people, you know, because it's you can't sustain this music going into the future by only the original.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know.
Marc:Yeah, of course.
Marc:You got to hope that that catches on and some people get interested.
Marc:Well, I think that because of the abundance of the work.
Marc: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.
Guest:Well, that's always the funniest thing, though, too, is to find out what record got somebody started.
Guest:For example, what record of Frank's got you to where you said, I got to listen to more of this?
Marc:Well, I mean, like when I was in high school, you know, Joe's Garage came out.
Marc: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.
Marc:And then, like, recently...
Marc: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.
Marc:I mean, I went and just started at the fucking beginning.
Marc:I also became sort of fascinated with Beefheart and their relationship.
Marc:So I just, you know, I just started at the beginning and I'm like, I'll just build out.
Marc:And then as you know, you listen to more records, I don't have, you know, I don't have 80 records.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, maybe I have 12.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc: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.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it was much later.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, the funny thing is that that's usually what happens is most people don't start right at the beginning.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, 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.
Guest:And there's this amazing like every record is so different from the next.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it's always fascinating to me to find out what is the record that gets somebody hooked.
Guest:So there's people that I know where their favorite record is this record called Burnt Weenie Sandwich.
Marc:Yeah, I have that one.
Guest:Now, that record is, if that's the first record that you ever hear...
Guest:I personally, you know, I listen to that.
Guest:And I mean, there's stuff that I totally appreciate and love on that record.
Guest:But if I if that was the one record that started me, I'm not sure where I would go with that, you know.
Guest:But so the people that go, this is for me.
Guest:This is finally a record for me.
Guest:You know, there's those people that like they get into it and they love that record.
Guest:And that's like that's their their dream to hear that in its entirety played live, you know.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:I know that Billy Bob Thornton, that's his favorite record.
Guest:So my point is, 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.
Guest:And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
Guest:If that's the first record, and you heard that, and you went back for more, it's like...
Guest:You're hardcore then.
Guest:Yeah, because Thing Fish is probably one of the most hated records of Frank's, but it's hilarious.
Guest:There's crazy things on it.
Marc:I think most people, in the broader sense, they seem to go with apostrophe.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, I mean, when I say, you know, if people say, hey, where should I start?
Guest:I always say, you know, apostrophe overnight sensations, good place to start, but then go back to freak out over.
Guest:And then, you know, the next couple like absolutely free and we're only in it for the money.
Guest:So you can see that in a 10 year period, he went from that to apostrophe and you go, what?
Guest:You know, how did that happen?
Marc:Yeah, I listened to Zoodle Lords recently.
Marc:That's a good record.
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:Which one do you go back to the most?
Guest:You know, I listened to a ton of stuff.
Guest: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.
Guest:That's that's the stuff that is sort of the fabric of my youth.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I love all that stuff.
Guest:And we've.
Guest:played so much of it over the years um but one of my favorite records is the yellow shark which is a classical record of of frank's and uh 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 sounds it's really really good
Marc:Now, what was that tour you did on the Hendrix bus?
Guest:That's a tour that's called the Experience Hendrix Tour, and it's run by the Hendrix family.
Marc:Is that fun?
Marc:Is that a money gig, or do you like doing it?
Guest:It's really fun.
Guest:It's sort of like guitar camp, because they have somewhere between 15 and 20 guitar players that come up and do stuff.
Guest:So Eric Johnson, Zach Wild, Kenny Wayne Shepard...
Guest:all the wizards yeah 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 uh well you know i get assigned different songs oh really yeah it's like guitar kit yeah yeah so i've i've uh typically played freedom a lot yeah um which i i love that song um
Guest:A lot of times I'll be playing with Eric Johnson.
Guest:The two of us will do, so we've done Love and Confusion.
Guest:Is there singing or is it all instrumental?
Guest:No, it's singing.
Marc:Oh yeah, yeah.
Marc:That's wild.
Marc:And do you do that every year?
Guest:Every couple years it comes around.
Guest:It's just fun because 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
Guest: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.
Guest:Because to me, that's the ultimate tribute to it.
Guest:But the way that they do that tour is people interpret the playing and make new arrangements.
Guest:And they do sort of...
Guest: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 their version yeah that freedom to do their version but for me I just personally I like the challenge of trying to
Guest: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 did he do whipping post he did whipping post did he like that song or was he making fun of it
Guest:Well, it started because in Finland, and there's a concert called the Helsinki Concert, there's a guy in the audience that yells out, whipping post, whipping post.
Guest:And Frank says, oh, we don't know that one.
Guest:Would you mind humming a few bars of that?
Guest:And the guy starts humming something.
Guest:He goes, yeah, that's what I thought.
Guest:So after that, Frank said, the next time somebody yells out whipping post, we're going to play it.
Guest:And so he made the band learn it.
Guest:And so then they did play it.
Guest:But he did like that song.
Marc:He does a good version.
Guest:Yeah, it is really good.
Marc:It's definitely a version.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But he's done some great covers of like I'm the Walrus.
Guest:He did Stairway to Heaven.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Earnestly?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's cool is they orchestrated the guitar solo.
Guest:It's all played with a big brass section.
Guest:So it's all big band horns playing the guitar solo.
Guest:And it sounds great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Well, there's one story that you might appreciate I'll leave you with about Frank.
Guest:It's one of my favorites.
Guest:One of the things that he was so amazing at is he was the guy that could say exactly what you wished you would have said in the moment if you were given the opportunity.
Guest:So there's so many things that happen in people's lives where they just...
Guest: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 um 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
Guest:And apparently he had a war injury, so he had some type of prosthetic leg or something like that.
Guest: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.
Guest: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.
Guest:LAUGHTER
Marc:That's hilarious.
Marc:Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you.
Marc:What is this?
Marc:Because I poked around a little bit on the line.
Marc:What is this guitar player project?
Guest:Oh, what the hell was I thinking?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That is a record that I started making...
Guest:Sort of as a goof to begin with, but then it turned into this other thing.
Guest:So more than 20 years ago, I started this thing with the idea that I would make a piece of music that was the entire length of a CD, which is 73 minutes, basically.
Guest:Well, I guess there's some that could possibly play 75, but it's in that range.
Guest:It's a continuous piece of music that...
Guest:uh, morphs moment to moment.
Guest: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.
Guest:Like you see Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger and all these people, but they're, they're just kind of there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, but some people come forward and whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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 Vai or Yngwie Malmsteen you know all these guys you know Brian Setzer and
Marc:I like that you put Angus in there.
Marc:I love Angus.
Guest:Angus is amazing.
Guest:He's one of my favorites.
Guest:He's a great guitar player.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the thing about his playing is I like to study people's playing and try to play things, you know, and sort of imbue it with the phrasing that I can interpret from them.
Guest:But his vibrato is he brings it right up to pitch and then just shakes it right there.
Guest:It's like this really fast, frenetic thing where...
Guest:But the physical nature of vibrato is to make it work, you have to kind of move the string.
Guest:Right.
Guest: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.
Guest:It's almost like to me to try to do what he's doing.
Guest:I have to like almost make the hand convulse.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so I don't know how he does it.
Marc:So where's where's where's what the hell was I thinking at?
Guest:Well, you know, the thing is, it's actually, I have it now.
Guest:It started on analog tape and then it moved to a digital format.
Guest:And then recently I moved it all onto the computer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so one of the things that I was doing at the time was I was actually putting in pieces of Frank's music that would sort of be these segues.
Guest:You know, I would learn how to play certain hard things on the guitar and then I would put it in there.
Guest:But that stuff is all coming out because I've been doing Frank's music for 10 years now.
Guest:And I don't need to put that stuff in there.
Guest:So I have to write some new little parts.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, there's still people I'd love to get recorded on there, you know, like Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.
Marc:That's a monster, man.
Marc:I mean, his playing is like, you know, I can't listen to his music that much because it doesn't move me.
Marc:But his guitar playing is like out there, dude.
Marc:It's crazy.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He's just one of those guys that has a sound and it comes just from his hands.
Guest:It doesn't matter what he's playing, what gear or anything.
Marc:Yeah, it's wild.
Marc:All right, man.
Marc:Well, it's exciting and I'm happy for you.
Marc:The record's great and you seem pretty good.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Marc:Thanks.
Marc:I thought that was a very great guitar conversation, and I found it very touching, that stuff with his dad.
Marc:I mean, it's no easy thing to be the son of a wizard.
Marc:And then cut your own path in your own life.
Marc:I like talking a dweezil.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Go watch my special more later on Hulu or on Amazon or in its original home on Epix.
Marc:What else?
Marc:Yeah, you know the story.
Marc:You know the story.
Marc:I play a little guitar maybe.
Thank you.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Boomer lives!