Rolling Stone Interviews Frank Zappa - 1986
%%%%%%% Transcribed 03.31.95 by evilbob@music-planet.com %%%%%%%
From Rolling Stone, November 6th, 1986:
FRANK TALK
Zappa speaks out on CDs, the PMRC, his son Dweezil and other modern
topics
by David Fricke
Frank Zappa has been unusually ubiquitous of late. The controversial
singer, guitarist and composer hasn't toured in two years, and his
last hit was 1982's "Valley Girl," his "gag me with a spoon" duet with
teenage daughter Moon Unit. But his acid wit and familiar Dutch
Masters goatee and mustache have been much in evidence over the past
year and a half - on radio and television, in print and, most
dramatically, in federal and state congressional hearings, where he
has pressed his counter-offensive against the PMRC drive for pop-music
censorship.
Somehow, Zappa, who's forty-five, has also found time to oversee the
burgeoning careers of his offspring (the latest to acheive success is
his son Dweezil, who has a part-time job as a VJ on MTV and has just
released his first LP). And he's continued to write and record new
music at an astonishingly prolific rate. Night School, his upcoming
album, was performed entirely on a Synclavier computer synthesizer.
Three albums of his classical pieces are also in the works, along with
a fourth alvum, London Symphony Orchestra Volume II, which will
consist of previously unreleased material from the recording sessions
for his 1983 collection of original compositions performed by the LSO.
For many Zappa fans, however, the big news is the recent release of
ten titles from the Zappa catalog, including vintage Mothers of
Invention albums, on eight compact discs. The albums range from the
1967 classics We're Only In It For The Money and Lumpy Gravy to such
recordings as the 1972 big-band record The Grand Wazoo, Zappa's 1984
Off-Off-Off-Broadway-style opera, Thing-Fish, and the 1986 Frank Zappa
Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. The CDs were issued by Rykodisc, a
Massachusetts-based firm whose agreement with Zappa calls for the
release on CD of two dozen Zappa albums over the next three years.
Prerelease response to the first set of Zappa CDs has been
extraordinary; according to Rykodisc, initial orders quadrupled in two
months. "I always believed there was truly a market for this
material," Zappa says bluntly. "I think sales figures will bear that
out."
Q: Your album catalog totals over fifty titles. How did you and
Rykodisc decide which LPs to reissue on CD?
Z: There was actually quite a bit of arguing about what this initial
release would consist of, because Don [Don Rose, president of
Rykodisc] was adamant about certain albums being a part of it, like
The Grand Wazoo. He wanted something from each of the eras, kind of a
retrospective exhibition.
What I pitched him on was releasing material that was digital in
origin or archival stuff that had never been released. The problem
with CDs now, as I see it, is that people on the manufacturing end
don't want to take a chance on brand-new digital product. Most CDs are
repackages of old stuff. I'm happy that those old albums are available
in digitized form for those people who want to hear them minus the
scratches. But it's difficult to get interest in digital projects that
start from scratch. And until you have things that are digital all the
way through, the true possibilities of sound on CD won't come out.
Most of the people who have CDs now are listening to analog material
that has been digitized. The interesting part about this Rykodisc
package is that there are a few selections in there that are
completely digital, right from the original recordings. That includes
London Symphony Orchestra, Them Or Us and Thing-Fish.
Q: What kind of digital repair did you do to master tapes of the older
records? We're Only In It For The Money, for example, has new digital
bass and drum tracks.
Z: The original two-track masters - they're almost twenty years old
now - didn't survive the storage at MGM. They were stored so badly
that the oxide had flaked off the tape. You couldn't listen to it
anymore. So the thing had to be remixed. I had to go back and find all
the original elements. You listen to We're Only In It For The Money
and go, "My God, there's a million edits in this thing." And they all
had to be redone.
Q: The London Symphony Orchestra CD includes a previously unreleased
twenty-five-minute composition called "Bogus Pomp." Is it from the
original sessions?
Z: Yeah. "Bogus Pomp" is like a symphonic suite of themes from 200
Motels. It's also a parody. There's a whole story that goes along with
it. I should have stuck it in the liner notes, but I was too lazy to
type it up.
Q: Do you have other unreleased material you plan to issue on CD?
Z: What's coming out in the next release is a double CD called You
Can't Do That On Stage Anymore that takes live performances going back
as far as 1968. The basic idea of that album is that today in live
performance there are very few bands that are actually playing
anything. They go onstage with a freeze-dried show, and in many cases
at least fifty percent of the show is coming out of a sequencer or is
lip-synced. Audiences have missed out on the golden age, when people
went onstage and took a chance, which was probably the main forte of
the bands that I had.
One of the great recordings on that CD is from London in 1978. We were
playing a matinee, doing "St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast" and "Don't
Eat The Yellow Snow," and there was this guy in the audience,
completely out of his mind, who wanted to recite poetry. He came up to
the stage and kept interrupting the songs. So we worked him into the
set, and the result is very strange - mass-audience poetry reading.
Q: You've been very active counterattacking the rock-censorship drive
over the past year and a half. Are you still sending out packages of
information and press clippings from your Barking Pumpkin Records
office?
Z: I've spent up to $70,000 of my own money that I've put into a
combination of my travel, preinting costs and phone bills just to keep
pressure on the other side. I've done maybe 300 talk shows and
interviews. And those Z-pacs are still going out the door. I will
continue to do it as long as people call up. [Call 818-PUM-PKIN for
information on how to get one.]
Q: How do you feel about your son Dweezil's success as an MTV VJ?
Z: If his fan mail is any indication, they got the right guy for the
job. The thing that's cool about Dweezil is he's just turned
seventeen. He IS a kid. He's not a guy pretending to be a kid. He's
the age of the audience, and he's a genuine music fan. He knows
something about the groups he's putting on. And he also knows them as
individuals. The little stories he tells don't come off like showbiz
stories. I'd like to see him do some specials.
Actually, Ahmet [Zappa's youngest son] auditioned for a television
series yesterday, to play a character named Stinky in a Showtime
sitcom. He's twelve years old, and he's not afraid to say anything to
anybody. He was reading in this room for the producers, and there were
these howls of laughter. Ahmet came out, and my wife asked what
happened. "well," he said, "they liked me. They said they were going
to bring me back to read again. I told them, 'I hope to God it's not
written by the guy who wrote this crap.'"