Frank Zappa in Guitar Player Magazine - 1982
%%%%%%% Transcribed 03.29.95 by evilbob@music-planet.com %%%%%%%
From "Guitar Player" magazine, November 1982:
ABSOLUTELY FRANK
First Steps in Odd Meters
Few Guitarists are unaware of Frank Zappa, who for the past 16 years
has produced dozens of albums featuring sharp satire, full-scale
orchestrations, and powerful guitar solos. Last profiled as the cover
subject of the Jan. '77 issue of Guitar Player, Zappa has since
released several albums, including the three-record Shut Up 'N Play
Yer Guitar series for his Barking-Pumpkin label: Shut Up 'N Play Yer
Guitar [BPR 1111], Shut Up 'N Playe Yer Guitar Some More [BPR 1112],
and Return Of The Son Of Shut Up 'N Play yer Guitar [BPR 1113].
Although all of Frank's albums have a sizeable quantity of guitar
work, this trio of LPs contains pieces that are specifically guitar-
oriented.
This Month, we welcome Frank as a regular columnist, presenting the
first installment of a series in which he addresses specific questions
regarding his creation of the Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar series. In
this and subsequent columns, he will also discuss his views on music
and solo techniques beyond the range of these three LPs.
Transcriptions of Zappa's pieces are provided by Steve Vai, who has
been one of Frank's guitarists for the past few years.
* * * *
GP: What made you decide to do the Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar series?
Z: There were a lot of requests from a certain group of fans that we
have for an album that just had a lot of guitar solos on it. I mean,
it's not that they delivered a specific order as to how it was going
to be put together, but there was a demand for albums with a lot of
guitar playing. Although I play maybe anywhere from five to eight
extended solos during a concert, the basic style of the show that we
take on the road is not guitar-spectacular oriented. There is SOME
guitar playing, and some people really like that stuff. And so to
accomodate them, I put it together.
GP: Why did you choose material recorded over a four-year period,
rather than taping new songs especially for this project?
Z: Well, there's a good reason for that. First of all, I find it very
difficult to play in the studio; I don't think that I've ever played a
good solo of any description in the recording studio. I just don't
have the feeling for it. And up until the time that I got my own
studio, I was working in commercial ones where you have to pay
anywhere from a hundred to two hundred dollars an hour for the time.
There you don't have the luxury of sitting and perfecting what it is
that you're going to play, whereas if you have a collection of tapes
made over the period of a few years - which I do - you can go through
that stuff and find musical examples that acheive some aesthetic goal
that you're interested in acheiving. Then you collect those together
and make the best possible performance out of that.
GP: How did you determine which songs you wanted? Was there a scheme?
Z: I tried to get different examples of different types of things that
I play. I have one basic style, but inside of that style there are
different things that I play. I wanted to have various examples of
those things. And most of the selections were made on my own gut
reaction to hearing the tapes and saying, "I like this solo" or "I
don't like that one" - just trying to find things that would fit
together.
GP: Your music prominently features unusual rhythms and syncopations.
A good example is "Five Five Five" [Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar]. What
kind of metric scheme was used?
Z: It's in 5/8, 5/8, 5/4. You count it like this: One two one two
three, one two one two three, one-and two-and three-and four-and five-
and.
5 o o o o o | o o o o o | 5 o o o o o o o o o o |
8 |_| |_| |_ |_| |_| |_ 4 |_| |_| |_| |_| |_|
1 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 3 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 &
GP: In a piece such as "Five Five Five", where you're in a meter that
would generally be considered odd for mainstream rock or jazz, how
would someone approach that without feeling as if they had two left
feet?
Z: It's a very guitar-oriented piece because of the way it uses the
open string. So it's kind of an easy thing to pick up on the guitar,
in spite of the odd rhythm. As long as the numbers involved tend to
frighten you, though, then the odd rhythms are not your meat. Don't
worry about the numbers - you just have to worry about what the FEEL
is. When I wrote that particular song, I never even stopped to figure
out what the time signature was. I don't worry about that if I'm
playing it on the guitar. If I'm writing it for an orchestra, then I
do. But I don't calculate how things that I make up on guitar are
going to look on paper or how it's ultimately going to be. I just play
it, and then figure out what it is later, after I've recorded it.
In other words, my theory is that written music in no way assures the
pedigree of the musical quality of what's being played. Just because
it's on paper doesn't make it any better or any worse than any other
kind of music. Music on paper is just a convenient way of showing
musical ideas from one person to another without having to hum it to
him. And when you get things that are complicated, it's really time-
consuming to hum them.
GP: So you view writing as a shortcut.
Z: It's a shortcut; it's a storage method. And in the case of the
transcriptions that are coming from the guitar albums, they're no
longer shortcuts because they don't need to shortcut it anymore -
they're all done. [Ed. Note: Transcriptions from the Shut Up 'N Play
Yer Guitar series are scheduled to be available in the next few
months.] But it's the way to show people who are interested in that
kind of rhythm what it looks like on paper and how it works. Also, in
a couple of examples it gives you a kind of positive proff that ESP
does exist: The guitar parts and the drum parts for some of the things
are transcribed and notated together on two staves, and you can see
that the drummer - in this case Vinnie Colaiuta - and myself were
playing exactly the same thing in a number of places where it would
have been impossible to guess what was going on. It's the frequent
little turns that are exactly ON, and then coming out on the downbeat
in the next bar, and over to the next bar after that.
GP: On the inner sleeve of your Shut Up albums is music from "The
Black Page." There are figures such as a triplet with groupings of
three, five, and seven contained within. How do you count such an
intricate part?
Z: Well, unless you're really skilled at sight-reading that type of
material, you have to start by reading it slowly. So I think you're
referring to bar 15 of "The Black Page". And that's a tricky bar to
play. But it CAN be played and it has been played over and over again
by a lot of different musicians in and out of the band. And it's a
good place to start if you want to come into a direct confrontation .
. . . .
Unfortunately, that's all I have of this interview. The article
continued on to a later page which was not part of the 2-page
photocopy I obtained. If there is anyone out there with the actual
article containing the remainder of this interview (or even subsequent
interviews from the same series of articles), please contact me, Evil
Bob via:
evilbob@music-planet.com
and you will receive MANY karmic brownie points to use in the unlikely
event that life goes into extra innings.