Nepotism runs deep in the entertainment world. Creative genes, however, don’t
always translate to a performer’s offspring. There are numerous examples
— I won’t name names — but suffice to say, the bigger and
badder they are, the harder it is for a son, daughter, nephew, niece, or distant
cousin to match the level and intensity of their famous forebear. With that
in mind, you can only imagine the expectations placed on the children of Frank
Zappa.
Each of Zappa’s four children, all christened with unconventional first
names, has spent time in the public eye, in one form or another. His oldest
daughter, Moon Unit Zappa, appeared on her father’s 1982 single “Valley
Girl,” and has gone on to become an actress and writer. Younger daughter,
Diva, has also worked as an actress, as well as a clothing designer. Zappa’s
son Ahmet has dabbled with acting, writing and music. Then there’s Zappa’s
second born, son Dweezil.
Like his siblings, Dweezil has done some acting and was even an MTV VJ for
a spell. What Dweezil is mostly known for though is his guitar playing. Early
in his career, it seemed as if he was distancing himself from the Zappa legacy,
following a path more in line with Eddie Van Halen and other guitar heroes of
the 80s. An understandable choice when considering his father’s staggering
body of work, which to anyone with a sense of melody, would be like attempting
to climb Mount Everest without any preconditioning or preparation whatsoever.
But in recent years, Dweezil has come to wholeheartedly embrace the music of
Frank Zappa. So much so that he committed to studying it inside and out. In
the process, he has become a better guitarist and launched Zappa Plays Zappa,
a group of accomplished musicians dedicated to playing Frank Zappa music. Along
the way, various alumni of Frank Zappa’s stable of musicians have joined
in the fun, while Dweezil and company have exposed the music to a new and varied
audience. It would be easy to call Zappa Plays Zappa a “tribute”
band, but, like the music itself, they transcend any and all labels.
As a lover of all things of Zappa, it was my distinct pleasure to chat with
Dweezil about a number of items, including his father’s music, other guitar
players, touring and his journey as a musician and band leader. The latter has
extended itself to Dweezilla, a week-long music “boot camp” set
in the Catskills featuring the guitarist and members of his band. Dweezil also
has a new live CD called Return Of The Son Of… and plans
for a DVD later in the year. Of course, along with “vault meister”
Joe Travers, Dweezil continues mining various riches in his father’s extensive
catalog and digging deep for hidden treasure in the archives to share with the
world. Frank Zappa may have left this world in 1993, but his son is doing everything
possible to keep the music alive.
~
You have quite a few things going on
this summer and I want to touch on as much as time will allow. First of all,
tell me about Dweezilla.
It’s a music school. The whole reason for doing it really is…I’ve
had a couple of chances to sit and work with some people periodically, different
guitar players. I always enjoy sitting around with other players and picking
their brain about how they approach things. In the process of doing what we
have done with Zappa Plays Zappa, learning all this difficult music, each of
us in the band has had their own transformation and gone from a place where
they once thought something was impossible and, you know, you spend some time
and figure out you actually can do it. The more times you make that same journey
and get the confidence where you can accomplish what you thought was impossible,
the better you are as a player. You have all this to draw on.
I spent two years completely transforming my own technical abilities as a guitar
player. The biggest challenge in that, really, ended up being the mental approach.
I had to freely familiarize myself with a lot of information, fundamental things
that I sort of skipped over in my own process of becoming a guitar player. I
had to graduate from being a guitar player to be a musician. I think the real
difference there is the ability to be able to communicate with the fundamental
language of music, and having an understanding of your instrument and its role
within an ensemble. As opposed to always thinking about it as, “Well,
I’m the leader and I’ll do what I want.”
All of these concepts I think are important to impart in a music setting; you
know, a musical environment where you’re going to learn stuff, and give
people a chance to utilize information in a real-world context. A lot of the
things that we are hoping to share with the people that are our students at
Dweezilla are things that will make them have better practice regiments, but
also open their minds to concepts that they might not have been familiar with.
There’s so much in Frank’s music alone that made all of us such
better players. The reality of what it is is we’re trying to create a
situation for people to experience music in a way that sort of knock down the
boundaries. There are some traditional boundaries in music, and even in the
way that music is taught. This school’s slogan is “look and destroy.”
The difference in our approach is, if you look at it from a guitar perspective,
in particular. Most guitar players wouldn’t even think to take a lesson
from a percussionist or a drummer. But the idea is within their style of improvisation
or their style is a very different mental headspace than a guitarist. For me,
I had to do so much to change my whole mental approach. I had to look at lot
of my weaknesses, which really were understanding rhythms and how to implement
them and how to improvise within complex rhythms. That’s something I continue
to work on all the time. Rather than work on things I’m already capable
of, I chose to work on my weaknesses. In that, I get so much more in freedom
in terms of improvisation and compositional ideas.
I’ve been working on different ways on guitar to improvise, and use quintuplets
and septuplets. It’s really the rhythmic figure that I’m interested
in. The notes are that important. You can attach any note to these because the
audience, if you’re doing a repeating figure, they can get used to rhythm
of it and the notes can become just a contour. Really, any note you want to
play will work.
It’s these kind of boundaries are being broken down and giving you the
freedom to try stuff that ultimately ends up being really interesting and musical,
and it takes you outside of typical scalular patterns and concepts that are
so familiar to guitar players. This is a chance to say, “let’s look
at this a different way.”
So this is an entirely different approach than your
garden variety rock and roll fantasy camp?
Exactly. What you have a chance to do is listen to multiple instrumentalists’
approaches on how they think about what they do, what their role in an ensemble
is, what their concepts for soloing are, and how they build ideas. Everybody
does it differently. There’s a lot of valuable information and different
perspectives there. As a guitarist, you could walk away with a completely different
appreciation for other instruments, but also a new path for yourself as a guitarist.
This school is designed to give anybody with a real interest in music a chance
to dive in and understand and appreciate it on a different level.
We’ll tailor our curriculum to the majority of the students’ abilities.
There’s going to be some one-on-one lessons. There’s going to be
workshops and jam sessions. But it really isn’t like a fantasy camp where
it’s like, “OK, we’re all gonna learn to play ‘Smoke
On The Water’ and we’re going to play it by 8:00 tonight,”
you know. It will be interesting and fun. I enjoy the process of sharing the
discoveries that I’ve made in my own autodidactic journey and to do what
I’ve done over the past five years.
And you won’t just be focusing on the music
Frank Zappa?
No, it’s really about music and music concepts in general. We can use
Frank’s music to describe the best way to implement certain complex ideas
because he really was a master at that. But, really it’s kind of what ever anybody’s
got a question about, we’ll do the best we can to answer that in context.
You also have a new live CD, as well as a DVD. Are
these one and the same?
The DVD is a separate one. The CD is called Return Of The Son Of…
and it’s a set that is the culmination of sort of the last two or three
years of touring. And it’s got some extended guitar solos on it. I chose
to make a record that features stuff that really would really represent what’s
happened within the band, and how the band has matured and expanded its capabilities.
In that process, my guitar playing has really sort of changed to a pretty drastic
degree. If you were to listen to this record compared to any of my own records,
or even the last Zappa Plays Zappa DVD, there’s a marked change in terms
of the ideas that I’m focusing on and just the improvisation strategies
that are happening. I think it’s an intriguing bit of contrasting material
on this record.
I’ve seen Zappa Plays Zappa three times, most
recently opening for Jeff Beck at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, and I noticed
your playing has come a long way and the band in general has tightened up. Playing
with someone like Jeff Beck must have inspired you.
Yeah. To me, he’s one of the few people that you can say is a true master
at what he does. It doesn’t really matter what he’s playing through.
The sound that he gets is in his hands and how he transfers an idea in his mind
to the guitar. There’s a handful of people who have an innate ability
to express themselves on an instrument in that way.
Eddie Van Halen, in his own way, has the same skill set. Even funnier to me
is that night (at the Nokia Theatre), Eddie Van Halen was right there, on the
side of the stage, watching us. I had a good laugh with him about it earlier
before the show. I said, “Do you remember the last time you came to one
of my shows as opposed to me coming to your show?” And he said, “Yeah.
You were 12 and it was your school talent show.” I had only been playing
guitar for nine months and he came to the little soundcheck and my guitar wouldn’t
stay in tune. So he ran home and got a guitar that had a locking tremolo on
it. My little band at that time was playing “Runnin’ With The Devil,”
and my guitar would just not stay in tune. It was just a funny full-circle type
of thing.
To be able to share the stage, even though I didn’t play with Jeff, at
that thing…I mean, he was friends with my dad. There were many elements
that made that an exciting experience, beyond just like, “Hey it’s
Jeff Beck.” There’s like a family history.
What do you think about what Jeff Beck is doing,
playing with orchestras and continually pushing the envelope?
I think it’s a great thing for him to be able to do. Ultimately, he sounds
good with whatever he’s doing. I like him in a situation where it’s
stripped down even more than that. Like on the DVD that he won the Grammy for.
The fact that he’s doing something that keeps challenging him and inspiring
him…he’s one of the few players, if you look at where started and
where he is now, he’s continued to keep evolving and grow. You couldn’t
really say that about anybody from that era. You can’t say that about
Clapton or some of these other people.
There’s a comfort zone most people stay in. Jeff went outside of that
and continues to do that. He walks a real tightrope because of the stuff that
he does. If he misses a harmonic, it’s over (laughs). Even when he does
make a real mistake, you can see him say, “Fuck!” There’s
some pressure because of the way that he does what he does. I don’t understand
how he can keep that guitar in tune or play those harmonics as if they’re
scales. It’s wild.
Tell me about the DVD you have coming up.
The DVD is a performance we did at the Roxy in Los Angeles. We played a show
that was 35 years (later) to the day that Frank played at the Roxy and made
the record that is called Roxy & Elsewhere. We played a fair amount of material
that was on that record, but we didn’t want to play all the things that
are on that record because there’s actually a Roxy film of Frank’s
that I’m also working on and trying to get together for a big release.
When the two got put together, if you were gonna watch one or the other, I wanted
a few songs that are the same, but then I wanted some more variety that went
into some other ranges in Frank’s career.
We played the song “Billy The Mountain.” There’s no film
of that song ever being performed at any time. It’s a 28-minute song,
it’s like a little mini opera and we were lucky to be able to capture
it on film because it’s a song we only played on one tour. There’s
over, I don’t know how many thousands of words of text, it’s a lot
in this particular piece of music. And that’s just one song of the other
20 or so songs in the set. I’ve already edited the whole performance.
Now, I’m working on the mixing the audio in stereo, and then have to mix
it in 5.1, so it will hopefully be out in the fall or early next year. .
You have lots of shows scheduled this summer, along
with some festivals.
A jazz festival or two, here and there. We have one in particular in France.
Some of the music we’re planning to play is definitely different than
what we’ve played on previous tours.
Last year it was Prog Nation and this year, jazz
festivals and jam band festivals. Just another example of how Frank Zappa’s
music transcends labels and genres.
Yeah, well one of the things that’s sort of a pet-peeve of mine is that
musicians generally get scolded by critics if they try to do something that
has variety. It’s a real annoying thing when someone says, “Oh,
it’s unfocused.” If you have different interests and you got different
styles and you want to put them on a record, you should be able to do that.
To me, I think it’s silly to have boundaries on music. You might as well
see what works. Some things are going to work better than others. But you shouldn’t
not try just because someone else thinks that it’s better to make everything
all sound the same and homogenized.
As it relates to Frank’s music, there are so many things that inspired
him and there’s so many different styles, sometimes even one song. The
material itself, I think, becomes universal in the sense that an audience can
appreciate the level of control in having to play it. At that point, one would
have to say, “What does it take to write that?” I think there’s
a greater appreciation for Frank’s music when people see it in a live
situation because it’s far too easy for people to become complacent these
days and listen to something and think, “Oh, they just had somebody come
in and program that or that’s an overdub.” When you see it and you’re
confronted with it in a visual display on stage, it really stands out in contrast
to the rest of what’s going on in the world.
At the Jeff Beck show, we were getting standing ovations for stuff as an opening
act and a lot of those people weren’t that familiar with this music. It’s
really a testament to say that music fans, people who like to hear musicians,
are in a situation where they have a chance to explore different possibilities
and boundaries. People really enjoy that and there’s not that much of
it out there in a professional setting.
Not in the world of American Idol (laughs).
No, no. We go up on stage and the music is the thing, so there’s no real
dancing or lasers or any of that stuff. That stuff is so not part of the world
of what we do. There’s room for everything out there, it’s just
that, like I said, there’s so little of anything that even resembles Frank’s
music. That’s what’s interesting to me. Very few things could you
say are unique and Frank really did have a unique style. I think, little by
little, more and more people are becoming exposed to it and appreciating it
for what it is.
I have to say, what you’re doing is helping
to facilitate that. Frank Zappa was a true original, in the most literal sense
of that word. You going out there, playing his music and exposing it to people,
like you said, who may not have heard it is just a beautiful thing. I didn’t
get to see Frank. I could have, but I didn’t. I feel like I’ve kind
of made up for that by seeing you guys.
I appreciate that. One of the things that is funny about all this is that I’ve
heard from different people. They describe it in different ways. One of the
things that I thought was an interesting analogy was when somebody said, “Seeing
this band, Zappa Plays Zappa playing this music, is like taking a tour of the
world’s greatest museum where the curator takes you on your guided tour,
but he never stands in front of the paintings while you’re trying to take
a picture.
When you first started Zappa Plays Zappa, there was
a great emphasis on the Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation
albums, with a few additional pieces from the early to mid 70s. Are there plans
to explore other periods?
Well, we have in the five years we’ve done this. In the past year or
so, because we lost our additional keyboard player and then we got a different
singer, we had to go back to sort of a universal arrangement. And now, we’re
hiring an additional keyboardist, so the material we’re focusing on is
definitely going to broaden even more. It’s definitely going to be filled
with a lot of surprises and I think people are going to be excited about it.
There’s a DVD I recently received called The
Freak Out List, which explores the list of influences included on the
inside sleeve of The Mothers of Invention debut album, Freak Out.
In studying your father’s music, have you also studied his influences
— Edgard Varèse, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, do-wop, jazz,
classical?
Those guys are definitely people that I listened to just being in the house
with Frank. And I knew Johnny “Guitar” Watson. I was actually a
pallbearer at his funeral. I love all that music. I haven’t checked out
everybody on the list, but yes, I think it would probably be a good idea.
