Original subtitles

Uh, I'll just show you a chord.

Yes.

And we just set up a rhythm on one chord

and I'll start doing something. Make it up.

That's good.

Tell me a little bit about the stage.

Yeah. It's-- look, it's not going to--

it won't be professional. It'll just be music.

Okay.

Homemade hoopla.

This is the first time that I've had a reason

to play my guitar in three years. So...

I'm sure you already know it,

but this is just the beginning

of your new future in this country.

And I hope that your new future will be very perfect.

Very perfect.

And as you confront the new changes

that will take place,

please try and keep your country unique.

Don't change into something else.

Keep it unique.

And now, I will try and tune my guitar.

Lardner: Many have always considered Frank Zappa

a rock legend.

And one of his friends tonight told me

that he wrote and composed music

to the very end.

He was known for elaborate, unconventional songs,

often with raunchy lyrics.

The social commentary in his songs

targeted the music industry,

the educational system, and politics.

Reporter: In America, Zappa was denounced by the Church,

had his concerts broken up by the police,

and his records banned by radio stations.

Lardner: His wife and all four children were with him.

They are together tonight

at their Laurel Canyon area home with friends.

Frank Zappa, dead at 52.

Back to you.

Rolling?

And... yes.

Okay. This aisle here

is where some of the best-known titles lurk.

Here's stuff from the Hot Rats.

Here's the original 24-track masters of "Dinah-Moe Humm,"

"Dirty Love," "Montana," "Inca Roads," "RDNZL."

Shut Up n' Play Yer Guitar, Joe's Garage.

Here's Sheik Yerbouti.

Tinsel Town Rebellion, Drowning Witch, Utopia.

Oh, here's Eric Clapton when he came over to my house.

Wild Man Fischer.

Captain Beefheart,

a little jam in the basement.

And around here,

down this darkened aisle,

is a collection of videotapes

from when I borrowed my father's 8mm camera

and made a bunch of movies.

I became obsessed with editing.

And I would edit just because I liked to edit.

I would splice any 8mm film that was in the house

to anything else.

When I was little...

I didn't have too much interest in music at all.

When I was about, say, five or six years old

up until the time I was about 13,

I was interested in chemistry

and especially in explosives.

I-- I learned how to make gunpowder when I was six.

At that time, my father was working

at a place on the East Coast

called the Edgewood Arsenal.

Edgewood Arsenal is where they made poison gas

during World War II.

Presenter: At Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland,

the Army Chemical Corp developed the machinery

for producing the nerve gas GB,

which had been developed by Nazi Germany.

And the nerve gas VX, which was developed in England.

There is enough gas there and enough gas coming

of the nerve gas variety

to cause the death of 681,481,000 persons.

Everybody that lived in the project

had to have gas masks in their house

in case the tanks of mustard gas broke.

So the-- the toys that I remember growing up with

were the little chemical beakers that my father would bring home

and the gas masks that were hanging in the hall closet.

And I used to wear that out in the yard

and run around in it.

And I thought it was a space helmet.

I had a lot of asthma.

I was very ill.

Almost cacked out a few times from the climate back there.

And so, he was looking for a place

where I wouldn't be constantly folding up

and a place where he could earn a better income.

And so, he took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School

in California, teaching metallurgy.

The last experimentation that I did with explosives

was when I was about 15 years old.

I'd mixed up this quantity of powder

which consisted of, uh, regular black powder

and then flash powder,

which is 50 percent zinc and 50 percent sulfur,

mixed with sugar,

and attempted to set fire to the high school

that I was attending.

It always seemed to me that if you could get a laugh

out of something, that was good.

And if you could make life more colorful

than it actually was, that was good.

So, any artist or individual who worked

in those two directions was doing something good.

My family was really poor.

Not only that, they didn't like music too much.

So I didn't really come into contact

with musical expression until 14 or 15 years old.

And my parents were opposed to any involvement in music

that I might be interested in.

But I remember this magazine article about Sam Goody.

Was saying what a wonderful merchandiser he was

because he could even sell an album

that had this ugly music on it.

The writer described this as, like,

literally the most frightening thing

that a human being could listen to.

This evil, vile album.

The description was something that stuck with me,

and then a few months later,

I actually saw the album in a store and bought it.

It was because of that Varèse album

that I read about in a magazine.

And hearing "Ionisation,"

that I-- writing orchestra music.

I had no interest in Beethoven, Mozart,

or any of that kind of stuff.

It just didn't sound interesting to me.

I wanted to listen to the man

who could make music that was that strange.

Because the role of the percussion

in most classical music is you wait a long time,

and then somebody goes ping with a triangle.

To me, that was all boring.

But in Varèse's music,

the percussion was playing an integrated melodic part.

And it was in the foreground.

And since I liked drums,

it was a pleasure for me to listen to it.

I thought it was fantastic.

I couldn't understand why people just didn't love it

the minute they heard it.

High school in Lancaster

wouldn't be equivalent to high school any place else

because Lancaster was a small town,

and very few people in the area

liked rhythm and blues music.

And the rest of 'em were kind of white-bread,

Elvis Presley fanatic types.

And I don't even remember how I met Don.

But he had dropped out of school by that time

and spent most of his time staying at home

listening to rhythm and blues records.

So, I used to hang out over there after school

and listen to Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

and Guitar Slim,

Elmore James,

Lowell Fulson,

and Johnny "Guitar" Watson R&B records

till three o'clock in the morning.

Went out of my way to get ahold

of the rhythm and blues records.

And it was very hard to obtain

because most of the white music stores didn't stock it.

And, uh...

I just heard that music and I liked it

and couldn't understand why other people didn't like it

as much as I did.

When I first picked up the guitar, I said,

"How in the world could anybody get any sound out of this thing

other than the open string sound?"

I couldn't conceive of what the frets were for.

But when rhythm and blues came along

and I heard examples of blues guitar playing,

I thought that it was something I really wanted to do.

So, I just taught myself how to do it.

Once I figured out that the pitch changed

when you put your finger down on the fret,

I was hell on wheels.

I had my first group playing other people's material

when I was about 16 or 17.

It was called The Blackouts.

A racially mixed ensemble.

Which did not go down well with the, uh, cowboys

and other bigots who lived in this area.

And, uh, we managed to play several jobs,

but the school and the city authorities

were against having it performed because it was regarded

as a threat to the decency of the community.

I started writing orchestra music

before I ever wrote a rock and roll song.

And then didn't try writing any rock and roll

until I was in my 20s.

And as long as a person has to earn a living

and if he happens to be a person who makes music,

he's going to have to do something to generate an income.

And the more humiliating the conditions

under which the income is generated,

the more the music suffers.

I did earn my living as a commercial artist

for a little while. I did greeting cards.

I wrote advertising copy for the place I was working for,

called the Nile Running Greeting Card Studio.

I talked 'em into letting me do my own line of greeting cards

on an experimental basis,

and one of 'em was, uh,

"Captured Russian photo shows evidence

of Americans' presence on Moon first."

And you open it up, and there's a picture

of a lunar crater with "Jesus Saves"

inscribed on it.

You are to hang by the neck until you are dead.

I'll see you in hell.

And they don't take me seriously, do they?

They're only reporters. They're all the same, God.

I had scored a couple of films about that time.

The one that I got paid for,

I went out and bought a good guitar and, uh, took over

the debts and the assets of a recording studio

in a town called Cucamonga, California.

I'm living in this studio.

It doesn't have a bathtub. It doesn't have a shower.

Doesn't have hot water.

I don't have anything to eat except peanut butter,

instant mashed potatoes, and coffee.

I go around gathering up pop bottles

so I can buy cigarettes.

But I've got all the electronic stuff I need

to make recordings.

Well, I've had long hair.

It was shorter than Beatle hair.

So, there was a certain amount of resentment

in the community for my presence there at the studio.

And this mysterious 13.50 an hour recording studio

was, uh, bad for their community.

So, they designed to, uh, get me out of there.

Eventually this guy came to me and said

that he was a used car salesman and that he and the boys

were having a party next Wednesday

and they would like to have a stag film made.

And I said, "Are you kidding?"

He said, "Well, we have about 100 dollars."

And I said, "Well, I can't make you a movie

for 100 dollars, but how would you like a nice tape?"

So, that night, we manufactured a tape,

which was supposed to be sex on tape,

but there's absolutely no sex involved in this thing.

But suddenly, the next day,

the door swings open and vice squad officers

from the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department

come blasting in there.

Pictures. Flash bulbs,

and it was right out of a bad movie.

They took every tape,

every piece of film in the studio as evidence.

And I went to jail.

They sentenced me to six months in jail

with all but ten days suspended

plus three years' probation.

That's the kind of stuff I had to put up with

living in small-town environments.

I don't have anything against small towns.

I think they're wonderful if you like that kind of stuff.

But it's very difficult to do the kinds of things

that I do in a small-town situation.

And the only thing I wanted to do was write music.

And so, if I was ever going to hear what I wrote,

I would have to put a band together.

All right. This is a song that we've been work-- working on

in secret for a... a while now.

Going to make an attempt to record it.

If we mess it up, we'll just stop

and do it over again.

It doesn't have a name yet.

But, uh, doesn't really need one.

He was a such a genius in his writing,

and he knew so much about all the old music.

He was able to marry all of that together, man.

It was-- I... I haven't heard anything like it

before or since.

Whatever brought you to Hollywood?

I came in search of Bob Dylan.

And, uh, I came to see the Lovin' Spoonful.

And I came to get away from my father, mainly.

And then we started living on the streets here

because he wasn't too happy about the overall situation.

So, one night we came in there,

expecting to see our favorites,

the Grassroots and Billy Preston,

and lo and behold, after two weeks,

they changed the bill.

And there was a group called Mothers playing.

The main thing I remember

is that they played a song that was 20 minutes long.

And everybody was getting tired dancing in the middle of it.

And on the second set that you played,

you played a song called "How Could I Be Such a Fool?"

And I remember listening to that song

and thinking I'd never heard it before.

And I was really surprised.

I started thinking to myself, "God, did he write that?"

And when I figured out that you had,

'cause I asked you after you came off stage,

I was going,

"My god, he's got talent. I don't believe it."

Do you think that perhaps you might, uh,

in a year or two be the new musical messiah?

As in the Beatles and Presley

ten years ago and ten years before that? Whoever it was.

I can honestly say that I do not think so.

The Mothers of Invention.

Bunk: I... I don't remember, in all the years with Frank,

hearing too many bands that had horns.

Guitar players, you know, all over the place.

Not too many, uh, bands had horns.

But, you know, at the same time,

I didn't hear any other bands

playing Stravinsky or classical music or anything.

So, uh, that was fairly unique.

And that made me feel good

about what we were doing musically.

I'm not a weirdo or any of these other things.

But when you get around other people

that are just naturally funny and do weird things,

I ended up just feeling very comfortable.

It was exciting in the beginning.

It truly was.

But of course, it was musically difficult.

Some nights, Frank would jump up into the air

and come down, and he would expect us

to know what song he was gonna go into.

You know, a perfectionist here, you know.

That made an impression that, jeez, well, you know...

So, it became our duty...

to engage in, uh, these kind of things

that-- that-- that would make him laugh.

The band wasn't specifically

anything other than Frank's ideas.

And each show was like a composition.

And they happened because the band

is following his direction.

You know, I used to think,

"Okay, he's called me here,"

and I don't mean in the early days,

I mean in full flower of playing with him.

We'd talk for a minute, and then there isn't even

a "Thanks for coming by" or "Okay, see you later."

He would just turn the other way,

and I would be waiting for him to turn back to say,

"Oh." But if he turned back, it would be, "You still here?"

You know, it's like, I was dismissed

without even being dismissed.

And you could interpret that as being, you know,

what a fucking self-centered asshole.

But I think that he was just so single-mindedly

needing to get his work done.

Bunk: In the four years I was with Frank,

he shook my hand once and said, "Good job."

I don't ever remember Frank embracing somebody.

Maybe that was his environment when he was growing up.

So, I kind of accepted that as...

"Don't get too close, okay?"

And, uh, I didn't.

I must say, this is a rather unprecedented response

for the bullshit that we do, so sit down

and we'll do some more if you like it.

So... so, it was in April of 1966.

It was at Los Angeles Airport, actually.

I was working as a secretary at the Whisky,

and there was another girl doing filing.

And little did I know

that she actually lived with Frank.

She shared a house with him.

And she got a phone call.

And it was Frank.

And he said, "Come pick me up."

The night that I went to pick you up at the airport,

and when I told you that I was bringing

this lovely young thing with me

because she was a lovely young thing.

And you needed to get some action.

And you said, "No, come alone."

And so, I said, "Okay."

So, I took her with me to the airport.

And then we brought you home. We went and got those steaks,

and I gave her my black slip to sleep in.

And you guys slept in my room

'cause I had the only double bed in the house.

- Mm. - And I slept on the couch.

And you waited and took her to work at the Whisky

in the morning.

It was that weekend, and... and she called

on the phone. You said,

"Tell her if she wants to fuck to come over."

And I said, "Huh, I can't say that to her.

You'll have to say it yourself."

And so you did. And then she came over

and you guys were on the couch fucking.

One thing that I'm very clear about

is I married a composer.

I don't know about whatever he is to anybody else,

but to me he was a composer.

And you have to be out of your mind

to begin with to take it on.

There's no guarantee that you're ever going to be

able to earn an income.

No one cares about what composers do.

And everything is against you.

Absolutely everything is against you,

which makes the odds pretty fantastic.

The guy who came to see us, Tom Wilson,

was having a good time with some girls.

And he was dragged to the Whisky a Go Go

to witness one of our songs,

which happened to be a blues kind of a number.

He said, "Oh. White blues band. Okay, we'll sign them,"

and signed the group

and then went right back to the girls.

Bunk: I don't think Wilson

heard a lot of the other things

because when we went into the studio,

he was totally surprised.

And I'm sure he wasn't sure

whether this was going to sell or not.

And we were out there.

This is a number we always play

when people ask us to play more.

Because we know that after we play this,

they couldn't possibly ever want to hear us again.

We're going to play a piece of music

that was written by Edgar Varèse,

called "Octandre."

Do you consider that your group

is just as talented and as skilled as, say,

men from a symphony orchestra?

Oh, I... I think there are definitely things

that this group of musicians can do that you...

you wouldn't be able to find symphony musicians to do.

Because not only do they manipulate

their instruments with great skill,

but they have to do it all from memory.

And they have to do it with choreography.

You insist on very high

and exacting standards.

Yeah. I have to insist on them.

I don't always get them, but I have to insist on them.

I think if you shoot any lower than that,

you're going to wind up with something sleazy.

So, we try and-- like,

the parts are real complicated,

so if you don't stay on it

and make sure everything is right

you don't get an accurate performance.

Bunk: Man, we would go in

for a minimum eight, ten, twelve hours.

I mean, you know, drinking black coffee.

He wouldn't stop.

I mean, it was, you know, it's like, "God."

It didn't matter if it was Christmas

or Thanksgiving or whatever, man.

We were going to rehearse and, you know,

make sure that we were ready to-- to play the music

because he was just writing all the time. All the time.

So, we were always introducing stuff.

It was, uh,

a very unusual approach, I think.

But we were never that popular in Los Angeles.

Our market really wasn't the peace, love, hippie type people.

That wasn't our market.

Hippies did not like us because we didn't do

the things that they approved of.

Compared to New York,

Los Angeles is a very conforming community.

When we moved to New York

there was virtually no scene at all.

There was no long-haired anything there.

People looked at us like we were from Venus.

A lot of people have associated you,

rightly or wrongly, with the drug culture

that came into being in the '60s about the same time

as your music first became prominent.

First of all, I have nothing to do with the drug culture.

I don't use drugs,

and I don't advise other people to use drugs.

And a lot of the things that I think are wrong

with the society today

are a direct result of people using drugs.

It's so prevalent that if you don't use drugs,

people think you're weird.

The Beatles played in Hamburg,

and they had their way with this club

for months on end.

And in a similar way, Frank had the Garrick.

You get to work out what you want to do.

You get to experiment with the audience.

You get to really be intimate with an audience.

That really helped Frank to perfect

what he could get away with on stage.

The attention to the theatrical side grew

when we moved to New York

and had to do a show every night.

The bulk of what could be classified

as theater of cruelty took place at the Garrick Theater

in '67.

And that was a unique situation because it was the same people

who kept coming back to the theater all the time.

It was part of, uh, this little routine that we had

with the two or three hundred people

that made up the audience at the Garrick.

Bunk: We'd get out and play,

and Frank would start abusing people in the audience,

you know, or calling people up.

Or turning his back on the audience, saying,

"You know, let's run through this," and ignoring them.

And they-- they loved it.

For Frank, his measure of success

is how close did you get

to the realization

of the idea that you first heard the first time you heard it?

If you get anywhere near that, you can call it a success.

But most of the time, you never even get close.

'Cause you have to rely on all these other people

to do all this other stuff.

You know, people like musicians and things like that.

To do the kind of music theater that we were doing,

you needed people who weren't afraid

to act up on a stage and do ludicrous things.

'Cause that was part of what the music was saying

that the whole world was absolutely absurd,

and so, here it is. We're giving it back to you.

In fact, if we hadn't left Los Angeles,

we would have just evaporated after the first album.

Band member: One, two, three.

I was a percussion major at Juilliard.

I mean, this was back in the...

the times of dynasties in music.

I thought that I would love it,

and all of that derailed for me,

it just crashed and burned,

when I heard my first Frank Zappa concert.

I just suddenly realized,

"I don't want to be a timpanist in an orchestra.

And I don't want to be a triangle player

in an orchestra."

To have to sit in the back row on stage

to play my three triangle notes.

That was not anything that appealed to me

from the moment I heard Frank's music.

And it's not that I was inexperienced as a listener

with other popular music or music theater or any of that.

Frank embodied everything.

Everything that showed me in that one concert

that I wanted to do that.

I would sit in my orchestration classes at Juilliard

in my baroque history.

These classes taught by the greatest people on Earth.

One day, I was in one of the piano practice rooms

and I was absolutely not even allowed to be there

because "That's just for the pianists."

And there I would be, trying to recall the melody

or the melodic shape of "Oh No."

Nobody was there.

And on this fabulous grand piano,

I played that piece to the best of my recollection.

And I can't tell you, probably within 30 seconds,

an officer of the school came in.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm just playing this beautiful music."

"Doesn't sound like any music you're supposed to be playing here."

And I said, "It's 20th-century music.

What are you talking about? It's by a living composer."

"Get out."

And if you were to hear that piece on the piano,

it could live in a concert hall.

It was that type of music that he could produce

that was a product of everything that was in him.

But you couldn't really categorize it.

You couldn't say, "Oh yeah, that's rock and roll,"'cause it wasn't.

"It's jazz." No. It really wasn't.

"It's pop music." No. Not at all.

Well, what the hell is it?

It's Zappa.

And I knew that it had changed my life.

That's the thing.

I didn't live my life and then look back on it and go,

"Yeah. That was the life-changing moment."

I walked out of that theater, and I was actually disoriented.

I... my whole world had been shaken up.

And Frank recently came back from a town near Brussels

where they had a kind of a European pop festival.

How did you communicate with these kids

who speak Walloon, who speak Flemish,

who speak, uh, sort of a dialect of French?

- What did... - I only talked to them once.

Murray: What did you say?

I said, "I'm really glad that you... you guys

had a pop festival in spite of the French government."

It's really very square.

It's just very depressing, you know,

to think of what Paris used to be famous for...

Go ahead, bleep it.

Oh, Frank.

Well, in the past Paris was famous for its...

But now it...

Frank, you're going to kill the tourist business

as far as the French are concerned.

I hope so.

Fr-- France ought to get its... ...together.

Bunk: You know, when you look at stuff now,

I mean, e... everything goes.

And it also brings to mind,

because we played with Lenny Bruce,

you know, how difficult it was in terms of your language, uh,

that people would not accept.

Lenny Bruce had a-- an incredible impact,

an incredible influence.

But, you know, Frank's influence was really, really strong.

And-- and it instantly just, like, made a beeline

for the most influential archetypes and figureheads

in rock music. You know, if you listen toSgt. Pepper.

It was obvious that the Beatles knew

what... what was going on with Frank.

They've explicitly said that Sgt. Pepperwas our attempt

to make our own Freak Out!

And the inner spread of the album,

whether Frank liked it or not, was powerful and iconic,

and... and, you know, the... the record company

were not wrong in terms of making an impact.

It definitely made an impact.

But Frank didn't think of it.

So there's a part of him that just bristled

because it wasn't his baby, you know.

And the second album, he put his foot down.

Not only was he in charge of... of the artwork

and he did his own collage on the back cover,

but if he had had the time and inclination,

he could have continued on doing his own album artwork.

And... and it would have been fascinating.

But I think when Cal Schenkel crossed his path

and he saw somebody that got what he was doing

and could capture it and could also focus on it

exclusively while, you know, Frank would look

over Cal's shoulder and say, "Try that, try that."

Frank just hands him his head, and you get just amazing cover

after amazing cover.

And that-- it's beautiful

'cause they built a world together.

Those album covers plays into that thing of feeling

like you're part of an alternative movement.

There had already been two otherSgt. Pepper parodies

by the time that our package was ready.

And MGM was panic stricken

that they would be sued by The Beatles

and wanted legal assurance

that The Beatles weren't going to harm them

for putting this package out.

And all the legal gyrations took about 13 months.

I know I talked personally

to McCartney at one time and said that, you know,

"The record company is panic stricken over this,

and can you do anything to help me?"

And it was like he was on the other end of the line, taking the phone and going,

"You mean, you talk about business?"

Like, "Oh, we have lawyers who do that."

He just had no interest in participating in a discussion

of the legal ramifications

of a parody of theSgt. Pepper cover.

That was at a time when it was very, very unfashionable

to be a businessman or even to have any contact

to the world of commerce.

I mean, people were living in a dream world.

How did they expect to earn a living

doing their music if they didn't have some idea

that the people who were distributing it

were only there to steal from them?

Most of the artists that I knew were too busy getting ripped.

If you just got high and went out

and did your groovy music and, you know, then there were

business people who took care of that other stuff.

It's time for a revolution but probably not in the terms

that people imagine it.

The thing that's wrong today is that the... the people

who are in control of the media and the government

and, you know, things that... that run the lives

of the average person in the street,

they aren't doing a good job of it

'cause they don't really care.

Why don't you run for president?

I thought about it a number of times before.

And then the thing that always holds me back

is that what would it feel like to actually be the president,

you know, and have to stay in Washington DC

in a house for four years? That'd be pretty grim.

A lot of what we do is designed to annoy people

to the point where they might, just for a second,

question enough of their environment

to do something about it.

As long as they don't feel their environment,

they don't worry about it.

They're not going to do anything to change it.

And something's got to be done

before America scarfs up the world and shits on it.

I wasn't in the United States

when Moon was born. I was on the road.

As I walked out the door to get on the bus,

I said, "Well, if it's a girl, name it Moon,

and if it's a boy, name it Motorhead."

Reporter: In California, actor Ronald Reagan

and Mrs. Reagan arrive to cast their votes

in the state's primary election.

He's the Republican nominee for governor.

It's his first political contest.

Reagan was the governor of California.

And there was a freak contingent starting in LA at the time.

And in those days, if you had long hair in this town

and you were driving a car,

it was such an infrequent occurrence

that people would actually wave to each other.

That's how... what a tigh-- what a small

and tight community it was.

Well, Frank was considered

by everyone on the strip and all the people in the clubs

to be sort of the-- I mean, the ersatz Pied Piper

of Laurel Canyon.

He was right in the center of it in the log cabin,

which was Tom Mix's old cabin

with his horse buried under the bowling alley.

People can't believe these kind of things.

With Houdini's house right across the street.

And he... he was this centrifugal force

of Laurel Canyon.

Any kind of rock star,

especially the British guys who came to town,

wanted to meet Frank. So, we would,

you know, meet these rock stars,

and they right away would say,

"C... can we meet Zappa?"

So, of course, Jagger was there, the Stones,

and all the local bands too.

But Jeff Beck, I mean.

Any... anybody you can think of at that time.

It was the center of the world at that point.

Frank suggested, since he had started a record label,

that we actually become our own group.

It was very ra-- unusual.

I mean, there were no rock-- girl rock bands at all

or rock groups. We didn't play any instruments.

And he wanted us just to capture our lives in Laurel Canyon,

on the Strip.

He thought we had something to say.

He always liked to preserve moments in time.

Uh, what kind of, uh, girls are these groupies?

Well, not all of 'em are groupies, you know.

Some girls that will readily admit that they are groupies

have a very special sort of mentality, you know,

and they... they aspire to that position.

But there are other girls who would never admit that they are groupies,

but who function in that capacity anyway.

And the... what about, uh, your wife?

I mean, does she like it?

Well, she's become accustomed to it

over a period of years.

Well, early, early days,

I did not notice any messing around.

When... when Moon was a little baby,

and then she got pregnant with Dweezil,

and she insisted they leave that scene.

I remember that.

Okay, that's it.

She... she was having another kid.

And, uh, you know, I don't think she liked it.

She didn't. In fact, I know she didn't like it,

but she knew about it.

I'm a human being, you know.

I like to get laid.

I mean, is... you have to be realistic about these things.

You go out on the road, you strap on a bunch of girls,

you come back to the house,

you find out you've got the clap.

What, you're going to keep it a secret from your wife?

You know. So, I come back there, I said,

"Look, I got the clap. Go get a prescription."

So, she goes out and gets some penicillin tablets.

We both take them, and that's it.

She grumbles every once in a while, but, you know,

she's my wife.

And he did include her in... in almost everything

that... that he was doing.

She was right there at all times.

All right. Now what do you want to do about...

I'll tell you the secret

to keep maintaining a relationship,

apart from the hideous uh, occupational hazards

that in-- that are specific to rock and roll,

um, which can throw you for an-- take you

on an emotional rollercoaster if you let it from time to time.

But...

the main thing is don't have those conversations.

So, Frank does what he does, and I do what I do.

You know, I used to-- had an expression in my own mind about it.

A polarity of passions.

Two different worlds there,

and it's sometimes very uncomfortable

because he couldn't fucking wait to get out of the house

and go on the road.

But then, he was also very happy to come home

just to feel safe again.

One of the reasons why I said,

"Let's get the fuck out of here,"

because Manson had set up shop in the mountain behind us

at the log cabin.

There was this trail that was maybe ten feet

from the bedroom window,

and every morning, I would see their feet

cruising around the neighborhood.

They were creepy.

I mean, the thing about the '60s,

you just know stuff.

You don't know why you know it, but you just know it.

You feel it. It's... it's just in the air.

And I remember that.

Reporter: The family's leader, Charles Manson,

denied that they were a violent group.

I don't know if previous generations felt that.

But I know we did.

Whoever was alive then did.

Alice: The way we met was that I met Miss Christine

from the GTOs.

And they knew we were looking for a contract,

and... and they knew Frank was just starting his own label.

And we were this little band coming to LA to try to make it.

Not knowing that he was going to be our savior.

Every record company turned us down

except for Frank.

It was weird.

He had the freaks,

and he had the very, extremely intelligent

and the very artsy people behind him.

And then there was the whole middle that didn't get it.

You formally disbanded the Mothers in 1969. Why?

Because it was a disaster.

We were doing a tour.

The tour wasn't successful.

At the beginning, I took 400 dollars out of my bank account

so I could eat.

And by the time the tour was over,

after paying everybody and everything,

I was 10,000 dollars in debt.

And it just seemed to me that this was not the--

a lifestyle I wished to continue.

Hey. That sounds like shit.

Want to get a level on this before we actually make it?

Bunk: When we first went out to play, after the concert,

we wanted to know if we were actually going to get paid.

There was always that kind of,

"Wow. What's going on financially?"

So, we didn't even get a two-week notice.

And... and I remember saying,

"I just bought a new Chevy," whatever.

You know. So, no.

It was totally out of the blue.

Totally.

I think that Frank realized, "Wow.

I just wanted to create something,

and I wanted to make a statement artistically,"

but there's people relying on you.

There's people expecting paychecks.

And then Frank is like, "This isn't fun for me anymore.

I don't want to feel as though I'm responsible

for the-- the happiness and livelihood

of... of a bunch of other people."

"All I want to do is... is make statements

and see how they sound."

The new format that I'm working with now is...

that if I want to form a group called The Mothers of Invention

I'll stick anybody in it that I want to.

It's just whoever happens to be right for the type of work

that we're doing.

Like, for instance, if I'm going to do a concert

with a symphony orchestra and I don't necessarily

want to do a lot of vocals with the orchestra,

then I don't bring the vocals.

Or I... I have, uh, occasion to play a job

with a small group, like four or five pieces,

where I'm just going to play the guitar,

I'll bring along an instrumentation

- likeHot Rats. -Uh-hmm.

So, I-- it gives me a little bit more

artistic flexibility, you might say.

Most of what occurred after that,

the groups were not as permanent.

They didn't have the same kind of personality

as the early Mothers.

The one that followed on after that 1969 batch

was the group with Mark and Howard.

And it had an identity.

- Oh, you're so professional. - Oh, okay.

The way you get to travel to all those exotic places.

Do you really have a hit single on the charts with a bullet?

They had been in a group called The Turtles,

but I guess The Turtles had broken up.

And I had done a concert

with the Los Angeles Philharmonic,

and they came to the concert.

And we decided that I would put together

another touring band called the Mothers

and go out and do amusing things.

Hey!

We were redefining

the expectations of entertainment.

But it seemed to me there was no reason

why that audience shouldn't experience

some of the things that had already happened

since 1920 in musical development.

Things that they were completely unaware of

just because they were a "rock audience"

and therefore deprived of musical experience.

It wasn't being presented to them in any kind

of music appreciation class in school.

Unfortunately, there were some people

who thought that it was bad because nothing should change

real rock and roll.

And anybody who would interfere with that kind of aesthetic

was viewed as a threat and needed to be disposed of.

And basically, my career has been...

year after year, waiting to be disposed of.

How do you know about success?

How do I know about success?

I don't know.

I watched The Beatles in the '60s.

I guess that's success.

Hey. Sit down and cool it for a minute

so I can hear what we're going to do.

And for-- and for those of you in the band who have no idea

what's about to happen, this is in A minor.

And it's not standard...

You pretty much couldn't find

a... a more pristine example of somebody

at the absolute pinnacle

of mainstream musical success...

who decides, "Wow. This is bullshit."

I'd just like to say hello.

And so, when Lennon and Zappa finally crossed paths...

in some ways, it gave John and Yoko's artistic expression

a framework that they never really enjoyed

in any other context.

And in some ways, makes more sense

when the imprimatur of Frank and the Mothers

are surrounding them.

Alice: I really think Frank was afraid to have a hit record.

Because I think Frank could have written hit records all day.

And he purposely sabotaged a lot of his records.

It was interesting 'cause everybody

was going for the hit record, and he never did.

That makes absolutely no sense to me.

But I don't disagree with it because I... I think

that that's probably correct, but I don't think Frank was--

had any interest whatsoever in writing an-- any hit tunes.

That's not even on his radar.

This man...

was just a walking mass of contradictions,

and yet... now I'm going to contradict myself.

At the same time,

he was very consistent with those contradictions.

Do you see any commercial potential in it?

I sure as hell hope so.

From 200 Motels he expects the worst reviews

of any movie ever put out.

His intention is to create a piece of film so bizarre

and parts of it so full of bullshit

and other parts of it so technically perfect

that the people are going to leave the theater, going...

"I didn't understand it at all. What's he doing?

What's-- what's the message? What's he trying to say?"

Well, that's the message.

Martin walks over in here.

You just come over and stand near the side of the organ

and watch from the background.

Just the whole idea that it is Frank Zappa

and The Mothers of Invention

has always given us something to talk about.

You know, Frank is, you know, our boss, and so there's always

that kind of management/worker relationship.

It's all very temporary.

And, uh, that's the way it works.

And you just-- you just never know.

I mean, like, it isn't the final stay

for any of us.

You know, like, this isn't the final Mothers

Frank will have.

It's hard to say how long we will be together.

So, they see that you're getting Martin back there and everybody.

You're waking them all up.

Steve: My perspective of it has changed through the years.

Because when I was in it,

I was a tool for the composer

and... and as-- is all of his musicians.

And he used his tools, uh, brilliantly.

It's like, whatever you can do that's interesting and unique,

it's going to be exaggerated

and used as he deems fit for his music.

Frank would often appear to be cold, aloof,

and not personally involved with his trained monkeys

as once he joked about.

We're just all trained monkeys, right?

He's the circus ringleader or whatever.

But I want to tell you that he had great feelings for us.

He was-- he was human.

There were times when I didn't feel

that he was so much.

And I did feel he was cruel at times.

But he was a passionate man.

And he developed real love,

I'm not going to say equally for everybody.

But the people that he loved, he kept bringing back

over and through many of the bands.

Many of the tours.

Frank was very loyal to the people

that had helped him along the way

even if they were the worst motherfuckers.

He would, um, go out of his way to help them.

And I can count on one hand the friends that he truly

would spend time with.

He was pretty forgiving for someone that he knew,

but if he didn't know you,

one chance, that's it.

Done.

You know, so he could be hardcore as well.

First of all, he was not injured.

He was attacked.

This myth about him falling off the stage,

that didn't happen.

Some idiot attacked him and threw him off the stage.

And I know a lot of people know something happened to you,

and essentially, it was that

a person of somewhat demented condition, apparently,

had pulled you off the stage

at a place called the Rainbow Theatre in London.

And you were knocked unconscious and pretty seriously injured.

And I know you were in a wheelchair

a long time after that.

Uh, there's been a lot of talk about some of things

that happened to the Mothers as a result of that accident,

but I'm wondering what, if anything, it did to you.

Did it affect your thinking?

Did it change any of your perspectives?

Oh, certainly. Of course.

It helps you to find out who your friends are.

Try sitting in a wheelchair for nine months.

You'll find out who your friends are.

The point that I was in the hospital,

you have a bunch of guys

who earn their living from touring.

And I was unable to tour for the bulk of that year.

So, I'm used to being active and traveling around

and having a good time.

And so, if you're sitting there and you are an invalid

against your will, uh, it does change your outlook

a little bit.

The nose is the important part

when you're making a Zappa head.

'Cause no one else has one like it.

It doesn't have ears, but that's because

they wouldn't be seen once you get the hair on.

But the hair is actually the... the simpler part

of this whole thing.

You can see here how easily the hair goes on.

How did you find the animator, Bruce Bickford?

I was sitting here with a broken leg,

and he climbed over my fence

with two reels of film under his arm.

Now, this is tough 'cause the fence

used to be pretty high, but he made it.

I hitchhiked up to Laurel Canyon

and then found his house.

We looked at the stuff, and he was impressed

by the number of figures that I could sustain

in animation in one shot.

As far as I can tell, he's the best ever.

And he wanted to know if I could help him.

I was sitting in the basement, and here's this guy

with this footage.

And he's been on my payroll ever since.

Motherfucker throws Frank off the stage,

and whether Frank likes it or not,

that's a huge marker for a new phase.

He's got to convalesce.

And what do you do if you're Frank Zappa

with that brain and you can't move?

And you can't get up?

He's got a restless, creative mind,

so he's going to start creating.

Ladies and gentlemen, I suppose you've noticed

that this is a clay forest,

and the forest has been manufactured

for your edification

by none other than Bruce Bickford.

Bruce, would you please tell us what's going on

on this table over here?

Well, all you have to do is just move it

a very slight amount.

And then you take the picture.

And you move it again. And just keep going.

And you can pick up speed after a while.

On making sure each time that you get your fingers out

from in front of the lens before you take the picture.

That's all you got to know.

Uh, at times, he... he was stubborn.

We were gonna make a movie,

and all he could think about was control. His control.

He had some emotions that ran deep

that he wouldn't express.

Bunk: I just accepted everything rather than questioning

why are you like you are?

But I could see the workaholic,

and that was where his joy was coming from.

I think that Frank didn't, like, express himself

as directly in terms of his own emotions.

I don't think he saw that as his purpose.

He had so much talent.

It defied everything.

When something cataclysmic happens in your life,

there's any number of ways you can deal with it.

You can just go, "Oh, my god, why me?"

and be capsized.

Or you can say, "Well, I got no choice in the matter here.

Something has changed."

He's not going to continue employing a group

while he's convalescing,

so that version of the Mothers scatters,

starts doing their own things.

And as soon as he's able to write,

wheel to the rehearsal studio, get some of the horn players in there,

put the charts in front of him, hear what things sound like,

end up with a stack of new compositions,

go out on the road, surprise people yet again.

Let me tell you something. Do you like monster movies?

Anybody?

I love monster movies.

I simply adore monster movies and the cheaper they are,

the better they are. All right?

And this is "Cheepnis" here.

One, two, three, four.

I want to tell you one more time.

I want to thank you

because I really appreciate this.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank every one of you. And good night.

Scott: I think at every point in his life,

he was trying to do the best thing

that he could to have no regrets.

But what was Frank honestly trying to do?

He didn't give a shit about the immediate...

world of his-- of his attempting to function

in the way that he chose to function, which was

"If I'm alive, I've got to be in the studio.

I've got to be at the music paper."

My desires are simple.

All I want to do is get a good performance

and a good recording

of everything that I ever wrote so I can hear it.

And if anybody else wants to hear it,

then that's great too.

Sounds easy, but it's really hard to do.

Steve: Frank was a slave to his inner ear.

So, he heard things a particular way,

and then he tried to manifest them in the world,

but there were limitations.

And... there's financial limitations to a degree

when you're dealing with orchestra pieces.

And there's performance limitations, you know?

You can just write something that somebody can't play, you know.

But the music needed to resemble what he was hearing

in his head.

So, this led to a lot of... I think suffering on his part

due to the inadequacies and limitations of others,

you know. Sorry, Frank.

We rehearse all the time.

Every day before we play, we rehearse.

We'll... we'll rehearse, uh,

before this tour, we rehearsed for three weeks

four days a week, five hours a day.

Steve: A lot of people think, "Oh, he was very demanding."

No more demanding than anybody

that has a job that they need to do.

But it would be really difficult for a musician in Frank's band

if he was asking you to do things that you couldn't do.

But he always asked you to do things

that he believed you can do, but maybe you didn't.

"Black Page" was a piece of music that Frank wrote.

It's probably, um, at the foref...

forefront of innovation

in regard to rhythmic polymetric notation.

No doubt. No doubt. Because there's certain rhythmic

situations in that piece

that are extraordinarily complex,

but the important thing

is it sounds like a beautiful piece of music.

It's unique.

It's a comp-- and it's nothing like anything else

in his catalog. This is Frank, you know.

And so, the "Black Page" is this piece of music

that was like this, um,

phenomenon to me and to many others.

There was no doubt that there was a person

who could write music, fantastic music,

who cared that it be played properly.

And what I'm hearing

was put on this earth for me.

It was for me.

That music is there

for as long as we have any kind of, uh,

appreciation for the arts.

The music that Frank made I think will last.

Producer: You guys fucking nailed that.

Yeah. That was good.

Now that you are becoming a successful man

on-- in the music scene, what consequences

could this probably have for you?

I don't think about it.

A lot of times, the people...

like what you do for the wrong reasons.

Live from New York, it's Saturday Night.

No, I don't do drugs.

I just don't like the effects it has on some people.

What do you mean, man?

What do you mean you don't do drugs?

Frank Zappa doesn't do drugs?

I don't believe it.

Uh, well, that was their idea

of something funny.

I think they actually did it just to make fun of me,

you know, because you know

what their orientation is all about.

You didn't get high with the original Mothers?

- No. - What about Freak Out!,man?

You mean, you were straight when you wrote Freak Out!?

Oh my, God! Oh, my God!

Ah, wow, man, that's such a mind blower.

I thought the whole skit sucked myself, and, uh,

I was just stuck doing it.

They wouldn't let me write anything for the show.

What is your function on this planet?

I am a musician.

One, two, three, four.

Ladies and gentlemen. Frank Zappa.

There was a part of him

that even though he had a lot of people's attention,

of feeling cynical about the fact that,

yeah, all these people are... are looking,

but they don't know what they're seeing.

Sometimes truth, when you put truth up,

really quickly, like "Here's the truth,"

uh, it's like, uh, uh, um, daylight to a vampire.

You know what I'm saying?

Some people are used to avoiding truth.

When someone puts it right on the table,

don't bring that plate out here again.

And don't play the music that the guy that eats off

that plate on the radio.

He don't-- not only thinks, he discerns.

We got to keep this guy under check, you know?

'Cause he can't be out there.

And that's just my eyes seeing it

as a Black man in America.

Anybody that comes from the outside,

or so-called outside, with ideas and new thoughts,

and you see this unknown hand just go like this

and brush you aside.

In those days, record companies

had a lot more control over artists.

Typically, what a record company would do is like sort of,

they would get it-- they were getting closer

and closer to 360 deals, which means they own

all the parts of you around your asshole

and everything else that goes with.

So, Frank wanted to do a box set.

They said, "No, nobody can do box sets. That's insane."

So then he took the box set apart

and made four albums out of it.

He went over to Warner's, and he just handed them over

and said, "Okay, we're-- I'm done.

That's the end of my contract. Here's your four albums."

And that changed everything from that point on.

But more than that, he's the first artist to go

completely independent.

You know, we set up our own label.

As Frank and Gail get into the Zappa Records phase,

and you know, one of the first albums that come out,

Sheik Yerbouti, which is a very successful album.

And it's got crowd-pleasing, really filthy shit on it.

But-- you get into the subject matter on that record,

and it's still dark. He's still in that dark place.

Almost every song on that record

is just like attacking a specific group of people.

You always were a renegade against the music business. Why?

Because most of what the music business does

is not musical.

How many lawsuits do you have out now, Frank?

Probably about nine.

Nine lawsuits against some of the most famous

record companies in Los Angeles.

That's true.

What do you think is the reason

that Warner Brothers didn't pay you?

They're a bunch of assholes, of course.

Steve: Besides the incredible freedom

of his creative perspectives,

his business perspectives were very independent.

I mean, he started his own label

back in the day when this was relatively new

and he was sort of at the forefront in a sense,

and that was very vital to their, you know,

organization and their income.

By 1982, we had started a small mail-order company,

and we did, like,

a million dollars' worth of sales.

For us, that was good business because you only had to sell

a quarter as many records really to make

the same amount of profit.

This is where all the fan mail comes in.

This is where I read it, and if you don't believe me,

look around you. There's boxes, and I read everything.

In retrospect, people think you're a genius.

But while it's happening, you're just,

"Okay, now what?"

And it's just an-- an idea comes to you,

and then you go for it.

Good evening.

I'm here tonight to announce my intention

to seek the Republican nomination

for President of the United States.

With the onset of Reaganism

and what was happening in the country at that time,

in some ways, I think that drew Frank out

of the more solipsistic darkness

of what was happening in his career.

This is the dawning of the dark ages again

as far as I'm concerned.

Never have the arts been in such bad shape

in the United States.

This is the Central Scrutinizer.

As you can see,

music can get you pretty fucked up.

Take a tip from Joe, and get a good job.

The business of music is all about this fake list

of who sold what.

The whole idea of selling large numbers of items

in order to determine quality to it

is what's really repulsive about it.

MTV's Top 20 Video Countdown is sponsored

by Burger King and by Three Musketeers.

The record industry decided

this is the wave of the future.

And they started signing only groups who look good.

And the whole idea was making picture music.

When the music business was still sort of about

recording songs,

you could have a hit record

if it caught on in one of 10,000

different radio stations in America.

Now, instead of having 10,000 chances to make a hit,

you got one.

That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

Steve: Even in the most ugliest chord he ever wrote,

there's always a ray of hope in there, you know.

As an entertainer, I'm responsible for delivering

the best of what I can do to the audience

that has bought a ticket to see it

or buys a record to hear it.

And what about your friends?

Your neighbors? Your family?

Well, I don't have any friends.

I have a wonderful wife and four children.

I like them. They're my friends.

So, your wife is your friend?

Right.

When you're not working, do you just sort of

cut yourself off from the rest of the world

and you're with your family?

Well, when I'm not touring, I'm at home.

I have a studio in my house. I do my recording there.

And when I'm done doing that part of my work,

I go off on the road and travel around

and do this kind of stuff.

They're here.

It's coming at you.

The kids didn't get to see that much of him.

Just the way it goes.

He was on a mission, and he was going to accomplish

that mission no matter what.

Well, the sweet thing about "Valley Girl"

is that it was Frank and Moon in the studio.

Them, you know, connecting.

Undoubtedly having a good time

even though it was the result of Moon, you know,

putting a note under, you know, Frank's studio door, saying,

"Hi, my name's Moon. I live in the same house as you.

Uh, j-- just in case you're-- you're interested,

I do this Valley Girl voice."

It was nearly 15 years ago

when the Beach Boys brought national attention

to California girls.

These days, another kind of California girl

is being immortalized on record.

There's a song getting heavy airplay

on Southern California rock stations

called "Valley Girl."

Hi. You're probably wondering what we're doing right now.

Well, you see, we have this problem.

We have this record called "Valley Girl,"

and all these assholes keep calling up

and asking for interviews and photographs.

So, in the middle of the night,

we have to sit on the roof and stand out here

and move around and do dumb things

so that the world's most famous photographer,

Norman Seeff, can take pictures of this crap for Lifemagazine.

That's what we're doing here.

"Valley Girl" was a very unusual accident

in the US.

We were a small label distributed through CBS.

Nobody at CBS had any idea

that that thing would catch on the way it did.

The way it happened was my daughter took

an acetate of "Valley Girl" to a station in Pasadena

called KROQ, and as soon as they played it,

the phone started ringing, and it became an instant hit.

People loved it right away.

Like, oh, my God.

Meanwhile, I'm in Europe on a tour.

I don't even know I've got a hit record.

In 1982, you couldn't walk around in the United States

without hearing something about "Valley Girl."

Next on Channel Five, it's awesome

'cause we're going to, like,

crank with the whole Zappa family.

For sure. Totally on evening news...

And that was his first big hit.

His only big hit.

But it really came out of Moon

wanting to spend time with her dad.

What's happening in the future now?

Have you-- Are you planning a follow-up right away

to cash in on the, uh,

the audience's receptivity, or...

No. As a matter of fact, the next thing

that I'm going to do is go out to, um, Cal-Arts tonight

and hear a couple of piano players give a performance

of some of my orchestra music.

So, there's "Valley Girl." A success, mainstream success.

But to Frank, it's like, "Okay, what can I do now?

I've got people's attention."

One. Two. Three.

From everything I'd heard,

and heard about Zappa,

it just seemed like he should write for Kronos.

Yeah. So, if we can play those longer,

I think that will be more effective.

How l-- uh, what length?

Hank: I have a quarter note tie into...

- Oh, I see. - It's very strange sheet music.

I think the first time we spoke

was after a concert.

I'm thinking '82, '83.

Shortly after that is when he began to write,

uh, the new piece for us.

I always appreciated the fact that he taught himself.

He went to the library as a kid,

and he just checked out books and stayed there and learned.

For me, that's been a big inspiration.

When I think of Zappa's life's work,

I'm reminded of Charles Ives,

Harry Partch, Sun Ra.

These are American experimentalists

that totally reimagined the way music

might be heard, might be composed.

And Zappa belongs in that tradition.

I still write orchestra music.

But, you know, nobody will ever hear it.

You sure?

Well, I don't wanna say never,

but, uh, the chances of the music being played

are not very good because every time we start negotiating

with somebody about having a performance of it,

all these problems arise, and it always comes down

to how much money they're willing to spend to do it.

Because it-- we've had some offers from orchestras who say,

"Yeah, we'd love to play it,

but we'll give you two rehearsals."

And it's impossible to play it in two rehearsals.

You just can't do it.

And I would rather not have it played

than to have somebody play it wrong.

Reporter: Tomorrow night, the London Symphony Orchestra

are giving a concert at their home at the Barbican Centre.

The program of orchestral music they'll be playing

is music written by the celebrated

American rock star Frank Zappa.

Robin Denselow has been looking at the least known

and the least commercial side of Zappa's art.

Robin: Frank Zappa has been quietly writing pieces

for a full orchestra alongside his rock work for years.

For their first ever performance,

he's using the London Symphony Orchestra.

The conductor, Kent Nagano, was chosen by Zappa.

Do you expect to actually make any money

out of the concert and the recordings

that you've come here to make

- with the LSO? - No. No.

Why then do you do it?

Well, I think that any artistic decision that is based on

whether or not you're going to make money is not really

an artistic decision. It's a business decision.

And there are a lot of things that I can do

to earn a living

and a lot of things that I have already done

to earn a living, which have produced the amount

of, uh, capital needed to do this project.

I came here to spend money on an English orchestra

to record my music so I can take it home

and I can listen to it.

And if somebody else likes that kind of stuff,

I will make it available on a record

so that they can hear it.

That is my part of the public service of spending the money

to make this event happen.

No foundation grant,

no government assistance,

no corporation,

no committee.

Just a crazy guy who spent the money

to hire English musicians to do a concert at the Barbican

and make an album for Barking Pumpkin Records.

How do you get the London Symphony Orchestra

to do your stuff?

- You pay them. - Yeah.

But isn't this a really prestigious organization?

Of course.

So, you pay them a lot of money.

- Yeah.

It's just as serious to write a song like "Valley Girl"

as it is to write the ballet called Mo 'N Herb's Vacation.

To me, they're equally serious problems in music.

Unless they have sufficient time to rehearse it,

the chances of an absolutely perfect performance

are not good.

Now, uh, how close did you get?

I would say that we're up to about 75% on this record.

Conductor: So, you could you take a look, please, at 159?

Robot: The inhabitants here do not have the intelligence

to be utilized anymore.

So, man built me.

Human beings are expensive.

If given the choice between not making music at all

or making music in a medium that a person can afford,

I will make music in a medium I can afford.

Ergo, the machine.

I had bought the Synclavier and started doing

all the composition in that medium

because you can write it the way you want,

and you get to conduct it also.

Even have it executed at any speed or any amplitude.

You can control all the nuances of the performance.

I would rather do it myself

than give it to somebody else to do.

Okay, Ahmet.

Stop the game, and I want to-- and have him get some

pictures of you with the clay.

I don't have any clay. Thanks.

There's 1,000 pounds of it around here someplace.

There's 1,000 pounds right behind you, Ahmet.

Don't lie.

What do you want me to build?

Whatever you want.

It's not easy to keep converting capital

from doing other things and to reinvesting in it

to doing that kind of stuff because there's no way

that the music that I'm working on

is gonna pay its own way.

But I would rather do it this way than to rely on

a government or to rely on, uh, you know,

a king or a duke or somebody who, you know,

wants to take drastic action if he doesn't approve

of your work of art.

You know, forget that.

Do you still think that music students in universities

are studying a dead language in a dead institution

by dead professors, and would you explain why?

Well, yes.

Because a lot of times, uh, composers will come to me,

and they'll say, "Well, what do I do?"

And I tell them, "Get a real estate license

because if you expect to write music in the United States,

what are you gonna do for a living?"

If you want to be a composer in the United States,

you must write for the media.

You can't just write music because you're writing music.

You have to have some other kind of a job

to support your habit.

And, uh, it's a sad story, but it's true.

This is ABC NewsNightline.

Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

A lot of people, and they are becoming

increasingly vocal,

find the songs and the rock video performances

that go with them offensive.

Reporter: One group of parents has heard more than enough.

The Parents Music Resource Center

wants a labelling system for albums and tapes,

much like movies are rated today.

Later this month, a Senate committee

will hold hearings on the question.

A tribute to the clout of the center,

whose members include Susan Baker,

wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker.

Susan: "Guess you could say she was a sex fiend.

I met her in a hotel lobby, masturbating with a magazine."

Reporter: Frank Zappa is one of the few rock artists

to come out openly against the labeling effort.

I mean, if it looks like censorship

and it smells like censorship, it is censorship

no matter whose wife is talking about it.

It's censorship.

The analogy you draw is a...

Frank was being called upon by Ted Koppel and CNN

and Larry King

and a lot of mainstream news outlets

to come on and talk about this stuff.

Well, he had cleaned up his act sartorially so much

that he was no longer visually the freak from the '60s.

He was somebody that understood that "If I'm gonna do battle

with these people, I need to like, uh,

come to them on their turf."

And they're taking a right away from him.

Frank became the go-to person for comments

to deal with record rating because nobody else

in the record industry showed up.

I think that they're probably concerned about airplay,

and they're probably concerned about their careers,

and they're probably concerned about, uh, you know,

taking a chance and opening their mouth.

But I don't speak for them.

I don't speak for the rest of the record industry.

I speak as a private citizen,

as a middle-aged Italian father of four.

I got concerns here about what's gonna happen

to the right to have free speech and right to assemble

and the right to have somebody use your own words

against you in a legal situation.

And nobody is sticking their neck out to say

that it's all a bunch of crap.

Mr. Zappa, thank you very much for being with us.

Please proceed.

I've got an idea for a way to stop all this stuff

and a way to give parents what they really want,

which is information, accurate information,

as to what is inside the album.

I have no objection to having all of the lyrics

placed on the album routinely all the time.

I think your suggestion is, uh, is an intriguing one

and might really be a solution.

I think your suggestion is a good one

that they print those words.

That would go a long way

to satisfying everyone's objection.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Hawkins.

Frank would say it was a failure

because it still ended up with the Parental Advisory sticker

on the thing.

But I think he made a difference there.

There were times that I wished that he could

modulate his approach a little bit

with a little bit less anger.

Sex equals sin.

But that anger resulted in some wonderful moments

like theCrossfire with James Lofton.

Do you think the founding fathers

really had the First Amendment, that they gave us

the First Amendment to defend songs that glorify Satanism

and incest and suicide? Do you really believe that?

- Absolutely. - You really believe that?

- Yeah, I believe it. - You're an idiot then.

- Yeah? - You're an idiot.

Well, I'll tell you what. Kiss my... [bleep]

How do you like that, buddy?

Well, take your teeth out.

I was surprised to see you heading the protest.

Why wasn't someone like Prince

involved with you in that? I mean...

He should have been involved in it,

but I think that it's his right to keep his mouth shut.

It's also Bruce Springsteen's right

to keep his mouth shut and anybody else

that they went after. They never attacked my lyrics.

They attacked those people.

They even went after Michael Jackson.

But you fought real hard for these people,

and it was never your music involved.

That's the thing that shocked me.

It's the principle of the thing.

We live in a country where we're supposed to be free.

Take a look at what happened in China.

You got a bunch of kids there who want democracy.

They don't even know what it is.

We supposedly have it here, what do we do?

Sit around and go, hmm, hmm.

"Let somebody else take care of it for me."

Scott: From the very beginning,

there wasn't literally anything like it.

As musicians, that was the way that we spoke to each other.

Like, instead of quoting movies, we quoted Zappa.

Scott: And it wasn't until I started playing with him

that I realized that he was fucking with America

as much as he was fucking around with music.

Like, America was just another canvas

for him to do his shit on.

This is working here. Hello, which one's working?

None.

This is censorship.

Scott: How did he see himself in a world

that was literally going mad?

He saw the big picture.

I cannot imagine in any way

it could keep a man like him down.

If anything, he would battle up

until the last drop of his blood was shed.

Overrun by orcs, he doesn't give a shit.

You cannot live your life as if you are

about to not be able to do your life anymore.

You know?

Czechoslovakia today became the latest

of the countries of Eastern Europe once held

so tightly in the Soviet grip to throw off

its hardline Communist yoke.

I guess it was about a year before

the Velvet Revolution, when I was visited here

by a Czech composer.

And through the interpreter,

he indicated that he wanted to play some of my music

and wanted me to come to Prague for the concert,

and I thought, well, the chances of me doing that

were pretty unlikely because Czechoslovakia was pretty grim.

And the next thing I knew, they had this revolution,

and this composer was a member of parliament.

And I'd already made four trips to the Soviet Union

and had been trying to develop some East-West

international trade.

Boy, is it cold here.

And I arranged to come to Prague on my way

back to the United States from Moscow.

And it was during my Prague visit,

I proposed to them that if they needed

some sort of representation in the West

to help them get investment or whatever they needed to do,

that I would be interested in doing that.

So, when I got off the plane, there was 5,000 people

waving at me. And, uh, you know,

never before in my life had I seen anything like that.

Get off the plane,

and, you know, there's a lot of people,

but there's no police, and there's no bodyguards.

There's no nothing. Just people waving at you.

That's nice until you go through the airport

and they start piling on you.

And to get from the door of the airport to the minibus

that was going to take us to the hotel

took about 40 minutes.

Gary: When Frank was there, it was like, Frank was

the President of the United States

coming to visit.

And Frank was trying to figure out

why was everyone there so happy to see him?

And evidently, in Czechoslovakia,

when young kids played rock music,

the police would tell them,

"Turn off that Frank Zappa music."

And all of a sudden, here's Frank Zappa.

He was a symbol of this freedom,

which is incredible when you think about it.

He had that kind of effect.

It was like the king of freedom had showed up.

I mean, Frank was shocked.

Kathleen: Rock musician Frank Zappa,

who's always been something of a maverick,

has just returned from a trip to the Soviet Union

and Czechoslovakia. And in Prague,

he met with Václav Havel,

now the President of Czechoslovakia.

He also visited the Czech parliament

and was named the Czech Cultural

and Trade Representative to the United States.

And Frank Zappa joins us this morning.

- Good morning. - Good morning.

Twenty years ago, did you think that

- this would be your occupation? - No.

What are the job specifications?

I'm supposed to represent them for trade,

for tourism, and for cultural matters.

Only rock business?

No, no, it's got nothing to do with rock and roll.

Kathleen: So, is this Frank Zappa the businessman

who's coming to the fore and not the rocker?

Well, let's say that Frank Zappa the rocker

has been pretty much excluded from US broadcasting.

So, Frank Zappa the rocker will now do something else.

It turns out that, uh, when he had testified

before Congress, uh,

our fine Secretary of State at the time, James Baker,

his wife had been involved in the, uh,

little Washington clubs going to save the world.

And James Baker went to Czechoslovakia,

and he had told the Czech government

that if they wanted anything to do

with the United States government anymore,

if they wanted aid or help or anything

that they would have to get rid of this association

with Frank Zappa.

Our primary purpose is to educate and inform parents

about this alarming trend, as well as

to ask the industry to exercise self-restraint.

Some say there's no cause for concern.

We believe there is.

Thank you.

When we were on the road in '88,

he was already feeling poorly.

But, you know, he had been told it was various other conditions,

various and he was-- he was trying

different ways to deal with it.

But, you know, he was getting sicker all the time.

He retired from the concert stage

at the same time that his illness was coming on.

We sat in the-- in the control room,

and he...

he said, uh,

"Well, like, you know, I've got some news for you."

And I said, "What?" And he said,

"I've just been diagnosed with prostate cancer."

And he sat back and took a huge drag off

his cigarette and looked resolute

and, you know, and somewhat, you know,

like, you know, "Fuck that." You know, like it's,

uh, you know, "I've just been diagnosed

with prostate cancer." He knew the--

what the effect of those words were going to be,

but he also gave off this attitude of...

"It's not gonna stop me from doing what I have to do."

And politically, I am in the process of, uh,

doing what we call a feasibility study to see,

uh, if it's possible for me to run for President

of the United States against George Bush.

That's quite a comment.

You feel there's a chance?

Uh, yes. Not a good one

because, you know, he has more balloons than I do.

Makes a lot of sense.

The next time I interview you, I may be calling you

Mr. President instead of Mr. Zappa.

Maybe.

Do any of these things work?

Uh, we're here to make a statement

on behalf of our family.

Although Frank was looking forward to being here

and really intended to be here,

unfortunately, he's not here.

As many of you know, he's been diagnosed

by journalists as having cancer.

We'd like you to know his doctors have diagnosed

prostate cancer, which he's been fighting successfully,

and he has been feeling well and working too hard

and planned to attend...

You're a legendary workaholic.

-Are you able to work? - Not anymore.

Not anymore. Tell me.

Uh, basically on a good day, I can go 9:30 to 6:30.

It's really slowed you down.

- Yeah. - Has being sick affected

your music, what kind of music you're writing?

No.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you've been doing?

- Uh, fair. - Fair?

Yeah. Good days, bad days.

More bad days than good days?

Yeah.

Let's do it. Tell her to hurry.

Yeah, she's got to cover up the results

of my botched transfusion here.

Ready?

He is diagnosed, and he really,

uh, started working in earnest.

And that in some ways, I think, was intentionally

a summing up while he was ill in the last couple years.

Steve: One of the things that Frank loved

was musicians that really loved what they were doing,

and enjoyed playing

to the best of their ability and took great pride

in the composer's music.

There was not enough through the years.

You know, Frank dealt with orchestras that were,

you know, basically paid and came in

and did their job just by, "Okay, here's another chart."

But then through the years, the-- his music

as it started touching more younger people

who were growing up and taking up instruments,

some of them had a deep desire

to play Frank's music that way.

So, when Frank discovered the Ensemble Modern,

this is a group of musicians that wanted to play his music

on a level that was yet to be achieved.

When the final event is put together,

I will make some structure out of what worked

during the rehearsal.

At the end of the day, you'll have it on paper.

And you'll be able to read it.

Okay?

Okay, so watch, and I'll just move the pitch around the room.

And instead of just playing your note, style the note.

Put some sort of different vibrato rates on it, you know,

your-- that's the one note you have in life.

You're really gonna play the shit out of it.

And your big chance to be a star with one note.

Here we go.

He worked lots of different

projects simultaneously.

But that shifted when it was becoming more obvious

that he wasn't gonna have the time that he needed.

And then I think he set up priorities himself.

Went too fast. Da-da, da-da.

There's nothing weird about the tempo relations.

There's nothing science fiction about this tempo.

Yeah.

You make decisions about what you can finish,

what's really important to finish,

which, you know,

is another kind of composition.

I see what it is.

I had written a letter that I had hand-delivered

to the house

when I really thought I was not going to see him again.

It was essentially...

a letter of love and gratitude...

for everything he had done in the world.

And not just the world of music

and not just my little life

but the world.

And so...

I asked him to read it after I would leave.

Of course, he opened it right while I was there.

He read it, and he said, um,

he was not effusive.

I didn't expect him to be, but he said,

"That is really, really nice."

And he hugged me.

And he looked like he was in so much pain,

and he hugged me.

But nothing. It fucking sucked.

Before Frank died, he said,

"Sell everything, and get out of this business.

It's hateful, and take, you know,

go get a house at the beach, and have a good time."

So, there you have it in a nutshell.

Thank you.

You got an extraordinary reaction.

I mean, 20-minute standing ovation.

How do you feel about that?

Well, uh, there's no accounting for taste.

Oh, come on.

You must have been thrilled.

I was. I was happier that they did that

rather than throw things at the stage.

We were loud.

We were coarse.

And we were strange.

And if anybody in the audience ever gave us any trouble,

we'd tell them to fuck off.

This is the Central Scrutinizer.

Joe has just worked himself

into an imaginary frenzy

during the fade-out

of his imaginary song.

He begins to feel depressed now.

He knows the end is near.