Original subtitles

It works like this.

If you take any kind of a melody, I don't care if it's Hawaiian music or

whatever it is, and you play it with a fuzz tone guitar and a certain kind of a

drum beat, people will call it rock and roll. But what you got is a Hawaiian

song. So how are you going to categorize it?

He

took

different styles of music, put them together.

and pointed out that there aren't really rules about them. You know,

they've been set up, but we don't have to abide by them.

He established a category of his own, you know, Zapper.

That's the way I saw him, as a composer, not necessarily of one or another kind

of music, but he wrote all the time.

It was the harmony, the instrumentation, the sheer force

of the personalities of the people who played it, including humor, a lot of

humor.

The mystery man got nervous and he fidget around a bit.

He reached in the pocket of his mystery robe and he whipped out a shaving kit.

He was completely ahead of his time.

years, decades ahead of his time. Even now, I think his music is still ahead of

its time.

Frank Zappa was the mad scientist of music, period.

He was the Mozart of the 20th century.

He was a free thinker, and he had an incredible intellect.

He was a very quiet person who really put everything into his work. So in that

way, it was almost like having a monk.

for a father uh a monk with um a lust for groupies dynamo might win the bet

but she could use a little if i wasn't done yet i told her just because the sun

won a place in the sky no reason to assume i wouldn't give her a try so i

pulled on her hair got her legs in the air and asked her if she had any cooties

in there

The pairing of overnight sensation and imposter view, which is inevitable

because they were essentially made at the same time with most of the same

musicians, it's really a turning point for him because at that point, he really

connected with an audience that stayed with him for the rest of his life. He

was playing the guitar amazingly.

He was singing. He was funny.

He was sarcastic.

He was right on. The music was, you know, unique.

As she abused the sausage patty And said, why don't you treat me?

At St.

Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast That's where I stole the margarine When you listen to

his music and you listen to the way it's produced and the things that are being

done, you realize there are no boundaries for him. He just completely

wanted to do nothing more than to just engulf himself in his art.

He made the music for himself, and if everybody else liked it, that was great.

I played those songs over and over, and it was like

discovering...

in a different way that your father was the coolest person on the planet.

My first recommendation to anybody who hasn't heard Frank's music is listen to

Apostrophe and Overnight Sensation because it has everything you could ever

want. It's got the rock, jazz, funk, the attitude and the humor all at once.

Watch out where the huskies go Don't you eat that yellow snow Watch out where the

huskies go Don't you eat that yellow snow I started writing...

so-called serious music or non-rock and roll music about the time I was 14, and

I didn't write anything that even resembled rock and roll or rhythm and

blues until I was 20.

I liked Veresse's music from the minute that I heard it. I just thought that it

was beautiful.

And I couldn't understand it when my mother would start screaming at me to

take it in the other room because it bothered her while she was ironing. I

said, but listen to the siren.

He just comes from so many different areas and mixes it all together. You've

got the Varese influence and the Stravinsky influence, and you've got the

old R&B and the doo-wop influence.

Anybody whose influences are Johnny Guitar Watson and Edgar Varese, I'll

sign up. From the first time I met him all the way through, he was always

writing music or drawing music or playing music.

When you start to look at his career in perspective, you get this incredible

sense of he was way beyond a man on a mission.

I don't know how he did it. He wrote so much music, and he got so many great

musicians to play on it, and he somehow found a way to pay for it and own all

of his master tapes.

I always knew that I lived with a composer who luckily was able, through

rock and roll, be able to afford his habit, which was writing.

writing dots on paper. The facility to write these charts and to

conduct like he did, when we recorded Freak Out, when I got to the session,

there were all these, you know, first call studio musicians.

There's some extra percussion, and there was a French horn, or who knows what.

Comes time to record, and Frank steps on a podium, of all things, and he conducts

these guys.

with the certainty of, I mean, I think this guy could really do it. So I said,

where'd you learn all this stuff, man?

He said, oh, I went to the library.

What will you do if we let you go home?

And the plastic's all melted and so is the car.

We grew up as a teenager seeing things like McCarthyism and, you know, seeing

the civil rights disputes all over the country.

And, you know, the somewhat United States of America was not what they were

telling you. You know something, people?

I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not

white.

Well, I've seen the fires burning and the local people turning. All the

merchants and the shops who used to sell their brooms and mops and every other

household item. Watch a mob just turn and bite them. And they say it served

them right because a few of them were white. And it's the same across the

nation, black and white discrimination.

The guy was so on it.

For me, it had real purchase.

And, you know, he was right at the time. I mean, that's for darn sure. I mean,

like what he was putting down.

That was part of the deal.

It wasn't just getting up there and playing guitar instrumentals.

That's why he called himself an American composer, because his work as a

composer, his work as a performer, guitarist and band leader, it was all

based on this notion that he had the right to say what he wanted, when he

wanted and how he wanted. He didn't just slap down the establishment, he slapped

down the hippies.

He slapped down the phony hippies. Everybody was fair game.

And that's what I liked, was the fact that I was fair game.

You know, he never really chose a side. The residency at the Garrick in 1967 was

crucial because...

It gave him a laboratory to work on not just the music itself, but the notion of

performance and interacting with the crowd.

I was stunned to see a couple of kettledrum on stage for a rock concert.

You just never saw that.

And a vibraphone. And just, again, the strangest looking people I'd ever seen

making beautiful music.

The way Frank had put the show together and the way

It had the different elements, but it was just a feel about the show. It was

extremely creative. It wasn't a rock and roll show. It wasn't a pop show. It was

just music.

Frank's solos were like sonic sculptures.

He never did the same thing twice, unless it was a particular melody line

that was integral to the song.

The one thing that's been consistent about the albums that I've put out is

that each one appears to go in a different direction.

But if you look a little bit closer, that it's all part of one continuous

whole. And that's the way it's designed.

People don't always concentrate on his

musicianship. And there's a lot of talk about his bands over the years,

what great musicians he had in his bands.

A lot of times he's overlooked as the sort of center of that. First of all,

you don't have great musicians like that if they don't respect you.

The band for Albany Sensation was put together and they were touring in the

early part of 73 and then they went into the studio and recorded those records.

We worked stuff on the road and we worked stuff in rehearsal.

I mean, rehearsals were intense and, you know, five days a week, you know, six

hours a day.

And so when the band went on the road, we were ready to go.

Probably some of the most fun I've ever had in my life was being on the road

with Frank.

We had already become a band.

I mean, we had been on the road playing, and so all of a sudden, we knew

instinctively what Frank wanted. All the stuff we did for Over and End Sensation,

I think we knew everything.

I don't think we worked anything out in the studio at the time.

It's kind of funny because I hear it now and it reminds me almost of some of the

guitar stylings of Mark Knopfler on Sultans of Swing.

These kind of little licks. And it's a little unusual for Frank, those little

phrases. She swept away her rancid poncho and laid out naked by the door.

We did it till we were on concho, and it was useless anymore.

Overnight Sensation was musically very appealing to me. I mean, it was like,

you know, Frank was a little jazz-oriented, but it was also rock and

roll, and it blended that really nice. I always liked that about that.

He had an ability to write...

a song filled with so much information.

You know, he really looked at using a rock band in the same way that he would

use an orchestra.

See, in there, you can hear a little bit of violin, which you wouldn't normally

hear.

It's molted together within the horns.

Another great texture idea that Frank was so brilliant at with his

arrangements.

There's a little violin again.

He got the most action out of the least number of guys.

And he's got George there with the synthesizer, who can sort of fill a

million roles.

It was a young instrument then, but still, it would blend with brass.

Just about as evil as you could be.

When you sit down to learn the stuff, you just are constantly amazed,

thinking, wow, I didn't even know that was in there. And if you take it out,

that's the thing that really made it have that special thing that he would

call the eyebrows.

So this is a great sort of counterpoint type thing where you have a call and

response answer and this special

vibraphone, misterioso chord is so brilliant

in there.

If you go back, Joe, and I pull that out, it'll have a completely different

feel. It'll still sound good, but...

when i add it back in the texture

it's

very science

fiction twilight zone but

you know you really can't point to too many other songs uh

or too many other musicians who had the ability to write that way and include

those things in their songs.

Frank had this very exquisitely delicate

approach at times to orchestration.

Whether it was with the rock band or with an orchestra, he can be very

delicate.

And the same thing with his guitar playing. But at the same time, he can

be... tremendously visceral.

So what we're hearing now is Frank's solo all by itself.

And you can hear the little wah-wah action going on, but it's not the kind

that you would hear like on, you know, Superfly or Shaft. You know, he's using

it as a really, just a notch filter to give it some character.

Real honky.

He did that a lot. He used to like to have that real mid-rangey sound. He had

specific EQs built into his guitar that allowed him to get exactly the right mid

-range frequencies to cut through the particular arrangement.

His guitar playing a lot of times sounded like razor blades, you know,

especially when he played an SG.

Coming up, we're going to hear the crazy vocal of Ricky Lancelotti.

Really an interesting guy.

Ricky was really crazy.

And Frank found these characters, I don't know where, but he would find

these people and bring them in and they would do just the most incredible thing.

It's just funny to hear the iCats under these circumstances.

You know what's so great, though, is just what Frank makes them sing.

Just the words on this one and other songs they ended up singing on other

records. It's just so funny to hear what is

the... soul sister, like the epitome of that sound, but singing about this

monster, this zombie wolf, and the whole part that didn't get used, don't bite

me, don't kick me.

It's just funny.

Well, I was quite surprised, you know, when I went to the studio and he says,

Napoleon, this is Tina Turner.

And I said, oh, great.

You know, how are you doing? And she's going to be singing with you. And I

went, oh, really?

Bollocks Sound is where we did those tracks. And that was Ike Turner's

studio. And I remember it kind of being funky.

Yeah, I remember that place.

I almost don't know what to say about that. You know, it's 30 years ago.

That's like a haze. But overall, I can remember spending hours.

The main thing is we.

not only rehearse for hours, but we recorded for hours. There were no

limits. There were no restrictions.

He was willing to try whatever was necessary to get the sound.

And that's kind of the way it worked every day around the clock.

And rehearsals were pretty much the same way.

I mean, this was a commitment.

This was not like, you just join a band and I'll see you guys next week when

we're on tour.

Uh-uh.

You join a band and you... This was a serious commitment.

Commitment to excellence.

Right about that time, people.

A fur trapper.

Who was strictly from commercial.

Strictly commercial.

Had the unmitigated audacity to jump up from behind my igloo.

Peek-a-boo.

And he started in the whipping on my favorite baby seal.

with a lead-filled snowshoe.

If you try and sing a complicated text, I mean, a complicated text is not a

collection of words that are readily apparent, you know? If you start talking

about the leaves, the love, baby, those things, words you've already heard a

million times.

Text... doesn't matter, because you can take those words and sing them

melismatically, turn them all over the place, and people can still follow the

contour of the idea.

But if you're talking about concepts or using phrases which are unfamiliar,

it's hard to get that information across if you're singing elaborate musical

lines at the same time. I do that every once in a while, just to be.

Nasty, but most of the time if the idea is out there someplace I try and talk it

The mystery man came over and he said I'm out of sight

He said for a nominal service charge I could reach Nirvana tonight

if I was ready willing and able To pay him his regular fee

He would drop all the rest of his pressing affairs and devote his

attention to me, but I said, Look here, brother.

Who you jiving with that cosmic debris?

Who you jiving with that cosmic debris?

You have to think about what's going on socially at the time, you know, in the

world. And I think that's a lot of...

Focus and interest in transcendental meditation.

Maybe Maharishi.

Don't trust anybody who's that short and who tries to go through customs with $80

,000 worth of wristwatches.

He reached in the pocket of a mystery robe and he whipped out a shaving kit.

Now I thought it was a razor and a can of foaming goo.

But he told me right then when the top popped up that there was nothing his box

won't do.

with the oil of Aphrodite and the dust of the Grand Wazoo.

He said, you might not believe this, little fellow, but it'll cure your

asthma, too. And I said... You

know, maybe that's why people think that

there's a lot of effects in there. That's Frank.

That's him. You know, there's nothing cute about it. He changes his character

to do that.

Frank's voice is excellent on that.

I just love his tone.

You're going to have to write words to a song, and you don't identify with most

of the rest of the lyrics that are coming out.

Writing songs about how the leaves fell down so nicely on that October day, and

then the wind blew them, and then it rained, and then you fell in love, and

your heart broke, and then stuff came out of the side of your mouth because

you were lonely and that kind of stuff.

That's not my idea of a good time So if I have to write lyrics because people

like to hear the human voice attached to instruments I'll write about things that

interest me and have an honest reflection of my point of view So I'll

tell them the same way. I feel I think gurus bite it

These

vocals didn't make the record

Frank could play the blues with the best. His technique was excellent.

And he was very creative as a guitarist. I mean, I love playing behind Frank.

We'd come back from dinner or something, and he'd sit down and just blow you away

with riffs or something or a concept.

And you'd stand back and go, how does that guy think of all of that? Frank

just had an ear for writing a really hooky, great riff.

I mean, you take a song like one of his more simplified songs, like I Am the

Slime.

It's about television, but it's about television in a specific way. It's about

how you are being manipulated. And you are just so wantonly open for

any suggestion.

It's coming off of that television.

And people view TV the way they view print material, like newspapers.

If you read it, it must be real. And if they tell it to you on TV, it must be

real.

I am the sky from the video.

There's not the sky.

It seemed like he was always at work, even when we were on the airplane or on

a bus or waiting at the airport or whatever.

I mean, there was always something going on in his mind as to what is the next

thing going to be.

And he did like to document things.

So just about everything that I think we did was recorded in some fashion or

another. I try and remember which concerts I liked out of the tour.

and I listen to those first, and then I find the parts of the concerts that I

think are exceptional, and I cut those out and make a build reel, and then I go

back and listen to parts of other concerts that I think might have

contained individual wonderful events, and then I keep collating this, and I

have one section of tapes that are just accumulation reels.

So he always lived in a sort of an ocean of projects that were in a circle around

him, you know, that he could just pick up that tape over there, and when he

was, you know, not interested in this thing anymore, he just couldn't think

about it anymore, and then he'd start working on something else. So a lot of

things got, well, it was a winnowing process in many ways, but a lot of

things got moved from one project to another.

There was always so much.

Always. He was never at rest. There was always more and more and more music.

And once the music was done, it didn't stop there.

For another tour, he would take that same piece and play it completely

differently. Like St.

Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast got more and more and more elaborate as we did more

and more shows, and he added more and more parts to it.

So it was over a period of time. It wasn't written just the way it appeared

on the album.

This is just such a classic Frank line written for percussion.

Let's bring in some other instruments.

Some nice Who Are the Brain Police bass parts that really didn't make it to the

record at that level.

See, stuff like that, if you stop it and go back, those are the really cool

elements that it's almost like cartoon-esque, the way he'll create one

phrase and talk about it and sing about it in a voice and then answer it with

this filigree with the musicians.

But it's got a personality and a sense of humor. It just brings it to life.

Let's sing Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast.

Where I stole the margarine and wheedled on the bingo cards and blew a velotree.

I saw a handsome parish lady make her entrance like a queen.

Why, she was totally chenille and her old man was a marine.

As she abused the sausage patty.

Many of the parts that Frank wrote for me just suited me perfectly.

It's the music that I would have written for myself if I had had that talent.

And Frank knew how to do that for me. I think he knew how to do that for really

everybody. There's a piece that was inserted into the apostrophe album as

part of St. Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast.

It's called Rallo Interior, and this was the lead sheet that I was given.

And if you can see that every single chord that's in here is marked B-flat-2,

C-2, F-sharp-2, D-flat-2. Everything is a two chord.

And what that means to Frank is...

He would take a triad.

This is a triad.

A three-part chord consisting of one, three, and five.

The first, third, and fifth degree of the scale. One, two, three, four, five,

six, seven, eight.

There's your tonic triad.

He would lose the third and move it down to the second.

And there is the definitive Zappa sound.

As in, for instance, all two chords.

Rallo does not have one triad in it. It's all two chords.

So that's an example of that. And notice the absolutely gorgeous manuscript.

I mean, and this was Frank writing it down as fast as he could.

Well, three mistakes, one for each decade that I've been away from the

music and the instrument.

It's something that I felt compelled to learn on guitar just because it's so

much a part of Frank's compositional style, the rhythms, the melody of it,

the way it all comes together with a sense of humor, but it's graceful and

it's just difficult as all hell.

I can only say that he was very funny. My impressions of him obviously were

from the point of view of a kid, so I found his lyrics to be very

embarrassing.

And the subject matter seemed to ruffle a lot of feathers, so I didn't enjoy the

nervous tension in my stomach if we were in public.

places, but he had fans that were so enthusiastic

about him and very emotionally so.

And so I know that was very important to them and very impactful.

I discovered Frank's music in the middle of discovering a lot of other things in

life. And it's quite an assault.

I learned about

what I would expect to get if I ever got on the road in a rock band.

If there's one thing I like, it's erotic activity.

This being the best of all possible worlds of rock and roll industry, ladies

and gentlemen, it affords opportunities for things like that that, well, my

basement may be great for working on tapes and cutting film and sitting there

and planning arcane procedures over vast 10-year periods and so forth.

It's not quite the same as going on the road, do you know what I mean? I think

it's fair to say that everything that Frank wrote was about his own personal

experience and then some calculated guesswork.

Dynamo Hum is close to my heart simply because... I mean, a song

about trying to make a girl cum, who wouldn't like that? And who would write

one, you know?

Makes a guy want to stiffen up his thumb and use it.

Couldn't say where she's coming from, but I just met a lady named Dynamo, huh?

Strolled on over, said, look at her bum, I got a $40 bill, said, she can't make

me come. I'm like, hey, who's this pant doing?

She made a bed for me, said it was a little bit tough, she could move at any

time on Mendel's scum.

I don't mind, I just called me a bum, but I knew right away she was really

gonna come.

So I got down to her.

Worked up a movie, said, step on my thumb, and I'm glad I don't taste any

machine gun.

As far as lyrics go, he knew that they were something that people liked.

It wasn't his favorite. He liked music without lyrics.

You know, on the one hand, you end up doing a song like Dynamo Hum, for

instance,

The horror is that you have, that's like the most madly requested one, and you

have to do that for the rest of your life, you know, big mistake.

Oh, be careful about the songs that become the classic, because like, oh my

God, and then it's too bad it was so long. It could have been a shorter one,

and then it would be less painful to have to do so often.

Got a spot that gets me hot. Here she comes right here. You ain't been to it.

No, no. Got a spot that gets me hot, but you ain't been to it.

It's such a funny concept It's so perfect for the times

the fact that you got to get out of it to get yourself into it and clearly

people have confused that as a sentiment coming from Frank, because he never was

involved in taking drugs. He always told people not to take drugs. Sex and rock

and roll.

What is that other word? Drugs?

Well, there was no drugs in Frank Zappa's band.

Overnight Sensation is much more focused on...

well, in many ways, sex.

Like a pink donation to the dragon in your dreams.

That's still an effect that can't be created in the digital world. You can't

take a vocal or an instrument and record it at a slow

speed and then pitch it back up the way you can with an analog machine.

Give me your dirty love.

Give me your dirty love.

Like some tiny little pamphlet in your daddy's bottom drawer. Give me

your dirty love.

I don't believe you've never seen his book before.

Frank called one night and said, do you want to paint an album cover for me?

And then he then explained to me what the concept was to Overnight Sensation.

Because he wanted to do a, you know, a Dutch master painting with all the

symbols being of rock and roll and being on the road and the two-headed roadie,

you know, and what his sexual frustrations were.

The grapefruit was his sexual object.

Frank was, you know, very gifted visually, artistically, musically.

I mean, he was the kind of person that you could, you know, bring an idea to

and who just jumped on it. You know, had the gift for doing art and had the gift

for expanding on the idea.

The yellow snow!

Cosmic debris and many more!

Pregsy and apostrophe!

You know, my Python boot was too tight.

I couldn't get it off last night.

A week went by.

Now it's July.

I finally got it off.

And my girlfriend cried. She said, Stay there, bud.

You know Zappa was such an amazing musician that he was able to bring

all these amazing musicians around him and have a real musical thing.

yet still sort of, you know, take the piss out of things or be funny.

Somehow he managed, with all the intelligence, all the humor, all the

irony, all the amazing musicianship, always managed to not be pretentious. It

almost gets to this point where you start saying, exactly what couldn't he

do? I mean, you look at video. He was just as innovative in the video area as

he was in the audio area. There's the video of Sledgehammer that was...

so-called innovative, you know, Peter Gabriel Singh back in 87 or 80. Frank

did this back 10 years earlier.

Oh, that's enough of that. The tunes on Overnight Sensation are some of my

favorite. They really are. The introduction to Montana, I mean, it was

Ruth and I had this sort of introduction that we did that was always fun to do

with her.

And then dropping into the groove at the vocal, you know, just this contrast of

tempo and whatnot.

And then just the whole lyric of Montana is just hysterical. It's nothing like it

in the world. That's one of the all-time classics because that was...

like a perfect piece of music.

I might be moving to Montana soon.

Just to raise me up a crop of dental flaws.

Raisin' it up, waxin' it down In a little white box that

I can sell uptown By myself I wouldn't have no

boss But I'd be raisin' my lonely dental floss

Raisin' my lonely dental floss

You know, back in the day, you know, with jazz and with this type of rock

music that Frank invented, there was extended soloing. So artists can

get into a space where you never get into in the studio, you never get into

anywhere except when you're doing these extended improvisations. And it's a

fugue-like state.

And stuff starts happening. You're creating in the moment.

His favorite way to compose was in the moment with a guitar.

So, you know, you set it up, you have a really well-rehearsed band, and the band

is happening, and everybody does what they're supposed to do. Then you have

this moment which belongs to you, and you go for what they used to joke about.

I remember a conversation with Frank and Beefheart where they were talking about

the perfect note. And the perfect note is really...

the only one that is possible to play that is absolutely correct.

I've always loved artists who had their own space in this life. He really

embodied something unique in music, and I think in today's world, which

seems to be musically so homogenized, almost no chances are ever taken.

Things are based on the least common denominator.

This guy was way over on the other side.

and i remember one time he says alice either you get it or you don't get it

and the people that got it they got it and they loved it and the people that

didn't get it that's okay they weren't supposed to i don't think that you'll be

able to look back and lump him in with anybody else

i think he created a genre he just really was very creative and he enjoyed

the process of being creative and he didn't feel like there were any

boundaries that should constrict what he was able to do. Just me and the pygmy

pony over by the dental floss bush.

And then I might just jump back on and ride like a

cowboy.

Almost every person within those bands, whatever generation you choose, they

were characters in a story that Frank was orchestrating and writing.

Far in the future, the music will still be there, and people will want

to play it. It's just so much fun.

He really brought it down to a level that made it truly accessible to anyone

who took the time to pay attention.

You know?

And it was funny. To me, absurdity is the only reality.

Whoa, are we moving too slow?

Have you seen us, Uncle Remo?

We look pretty sharp in these clothes.

Yes we do.

Unless we get sprayed with a hose.

It ain't bad in the day if they squirt it your way.

Except in the winter when it's froze.

And it's hard if it hits on your nose.

Right about that time, people.

A fur trapper.

Who was strictly from commercial.

Strictly commercial.

Had the unmitigated audacity to jump up from behind my igloo.

Peek-a-boo.

And he started in the whipping on my favorite baby seal.