Zappa plays Zappa

[sadie1263]

Though he died in 1993 aged only 52, Frank Zappa recorded more than 80 albums which covered an astonishing amount of musical turf. Jazz-fusion, progressive rock, musique concrète, scatalogical satire, movie soundtracks and orchestral compositions all figured in Zappa’s teeming aural universe, and he is regarded as one of the most stubbornly individualistic artists of the late 20th century.

But nobody ever accused him of being easy listening, and it’s difficult to imagine an artist less attuned to our blaringly commercialised pop era. In 2006, his son Dweezil decided it was high time Zappa’s legacy made itself known to new generations of listeners who had never had their brain cells nuked by its spiky wit and wilful complexity.

“I felt Frank’s music was under-appreciated and misunderstood, and his contributions were too great for them to be allowed to disappear in my lifetime,” says Dweezil. “I noticed that, if you said to people younger than me, 'Hey, what do you know about Frank Zappa?’ they’d say, 'Who?’ I thought, if I’m going to do something about this, I need to make the effort now.”

Thus he conceived the idea of Zappa Plays Zappa, a band devoted to sustaining Frank’s legacy by performing his music for younger listeners who were unaware of it, as well as for Zappa’s surviving fans. The unit arrives for an extensive British tour this week, following a one-off appearance at the Roundhouse a year ago to celebrate what would have been Frank’s 70th birthday, and once again it will perform his 1974 album Apostrophe in its entirety alongside a selection of his other works.

However, in order to pick up the baton from his dad, Dweezil first had to learn how to play the music himself. He was already an accomplished rock guitarist, with a particular fondness for the hyper-blitzkrieg playing style of Eddie van Halen, but his father’s work demanded a different order of expertise and musical understanding altogether.

“The challenges were great and numerous,” says Dweezil. “I’d spent more than 30 years playing guitar, but I had to change how I did everything. It was like getting a lobotomy and then training for the Olympics. I’d be practising the same tiny part for eight hours a day, until the technique became something I didn’t have to think about.
“I’d always learned everything by ear, and I didn’t have a strong background in musical theory, but that was vital to be able to learn Frank’s music. Even more importantly, I had to be able to communicate with my other musicians in a language that made sense.”

Frank Zappa’s music is crammed with complex rhythms, difficult key changes and baffling time signatures –in fact, it’s strange that he tends to get pigeonholed under “rock” because he had more in common with composer Edgard Varèse or jazzman Thelonious Monk than he did with Aerosmith – and he insisted on using state-of-the-art technology to ensure that every nuance of sound was rendered with fanatical clarity. He was also extremely specific about how his precisely scored music should be performed.

“Frank’s original versions of his songs were orchestrated and arranged with particular instrumentation so they could be heard a certain way,” says Dweezil. “We try to recreate the same timbre of the orchestration so the original piece emerges intact. We try to keep the authentic sound and personality of each piece, so if it’s from the Sixties we choose sounds appropriate to that time period.”

That way, he reckons, the music retains an authentic Frank Zappa feel, which means it sounds entirely different from anything going on in contemporary music.

“Modern records are all made with virtually identical gear, software plug-ins and everything,” says Dweezil. “Everybody wants everything to sound like the last thing that was popular because they’re chasing their tails. Frank never did any of that. He did what he wanted to do, and, if people were interested in it, great. He was still going to do it if they weren’t.”

Dweezil remembers playing a guitar solo onstage with his father’s band at the Hammersmith Odeon when he was 12, and being Frank’s son has clearly been a dominant force in his life. Dad even makes an appearance on a video screen in the Zappa Plays Zappa shows, his voice and playing digitally synced with the band. Doesn’t Dweezil feel under pressure from living in his giant shadow?

“I never looked at it that way because I was always such a fan of his work that I knew the music would speak for itself. I feel that through my father’s music I’ve found my own voice in my own playing. On the other hand, you get people saying, 'Everything must have been so easy because you had all the doors opened for you.’ Well no! Frank had every door slammed in his face, and I learned a lot from him about how revolting the commercial side of the record industry is. People think I was some trust-fund kid, but that’s all bulls---.”

Not that there aren’t other facets of Dweezil’s personality. Apart from making half a dozen solo albums and a couple more in tandem with his brother Ahmet (they formed a band called Z), he co-hosted a TV variety show called Happy Hour with Ahmet, and appeared in the sitcom Normal Life with his sister Moon Unit. A flirtation with Hollywood brought him small roles in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man and the Brat-Pack flick Pretty in Pink. In 2004, he even fronted a cooking show on the Food Network called Dweezil & Lisa, with his then partner Lisa Loeb.

“Well, who doesn’t like food?” he says. “I was in Sicily last week, and I had a traditional sandwich made from spleen. I wouldn’t normally say, 'Let me try the spleenburger’, but it was actually pretty good.

“The thing with food is that you can give 20 people the same recipe and the same ingredients, and somebody’s going to make it better than somebody else, and that’s the creativity of it. It’s like music. You could have a bunch of people playing the same piece, and somebody’s gonna play it better.”