Frank Zappa vs the World! - Part Two

from BAM Magazine, October 5, 1979
"If you thought 'Jewish Princess' was offensive, wait 'til you hear 'Catholic Girls'"

This new music sounds great, but why did you bother recording this spring, if you already had Warts And All and Shut Up And Play Your Guitar finished and ready to go?
Oh I'm just a crazy kind of guy. We went in there to cut two songs—"Joe's Garage" and "Catholic Girls"—which I was going to release together as a summer single. And we just got into it and the next thing we knew, we had all those tracks laid down.

As a prolific composer, you must get really anxious to hear your new material actually being played by musicians
Oh, yeah... I can't wait to hear it, but it's so expensive to hear it, you can only do it at certain times of the year. You need a reason, like making a record. What I really want to hear is that orchestra stuff I wrote for the Vienna Symphony, but that's too expensive. That program was cancelled because the Austrian television station (which had planned to broadcast the program) backed out of the deal.

I know you've been working on a film, Baby Snakes, for about two years. What's the latest on that?
Well some of it's sitting in those boxes over there, and some of it's in the vault. It's another case where I didn't have enough money to finish it. I already put $400,000 into it and needed another half a million dollars to complete it. All we did for about three or four months was wander around looking for people to put up the money, but we couldn't find anybody. The general attitude in Hollywood is that concert movies don't sell. They believe that the only concert movie that made any money was Woodstock. So they don't want to tak about it if there's a concert involved in it, which is the case with Baby Snakes.

You wrote the soundtrack for a film, The World's Greatest Sinner, when you were 21 years old. What was that about?
It's about a guy who decides to form a religion. He calls himself god and gathers all these followers. Then one night, he wonders whether or not he really is god. So in order to check himself out, he breaks into a supposedly Catholic church, steals a communion wafer, runs home and sticks a pin in it to see if it'll bleed. It leaves a trail of blood all the way across the lawn and he repents and...oh, it was stupidity.

I also understand you've been working on a musical play called Hunch In Tooth?
No, no—Hunchentoot. It's about a giant spider and an evil space girl. The script and music is all written, it's meant for a cabaret-type band. I've got all these things I'd like to do, but unfortunately, they don't just happen. It takes somebody to put up the money and most of the money that I've got right now is tied up in building a studio (alongside the house). So when somebody comes along with money to do a Broadway show, there's Hunchentoot; somebody with money comes along who wants to do a movie, there's Baby Snakes; somebody with money comes along who wants to do an orchestra concert, there's tons of orchestra music sitting out there. I just do my job.

Zappa Records is also about to release an album by an Indian violinist named L. Shankar. How did that happen?
I met him at a pop festival in Germany, when he was working with [John] McLaughlin. i think Shankar's probably the best violinist in the world; he's really incredible. We recorded the album in England, with an English rhythm section. Most of the compositions are his—I added a few lines and wrote the lyrics that are on the album, and I did the arrangements and orchestration.

Over the years, have you come to rely more and more on yourself when recording?
I do as much as I can. My responsibilities increased rapidly over the first three albums, and then stayed the same. Once I started producing the records, that was my gig.

Hav you always been attracted to mechanical devices of a creative nature?
Well, I like machines better than people because they don't usually argue, and you only have to pay for them once. If I wasn't making records, I'd probably have something to doodle around with. But I don't use this stuff as a toy; I don't come down here and just putz around with it. These are the tools that help me make music, which is my life!

What did you think about "Dancin' Fool" being an AM hit?
In the words of a very wise man, there's no accounting for taste. I really don't think that the Bee Gees consumer is the same consumer for "Dancin' Fool." It's too hard to dance to—it's just a comedy song. You can dance to the new one that goes, "Fuck me you ugly son of a bitch." ["Short Girls," a tune on the forthcoming Joe's Garage, Act Two.] That's a good dance song. We'll see if it stirs any excitement in New York. [He chuckles]

Does it surprise you when people take offense at your humor, or at least, pretend to?
No, because hypocrisy is the cornerstone of the American Way of Life. It's the pretending to be offended that's really hypocritical about it. They know what's going on! But Americans are trained to be just like other Americans. It's like, how do you know if you're a cool guy? If everybody likes you! How do you make other people like you? By being just like them! Because, you know what other people like more than anything else in the world? Themselves! Because nobody ever agrees with you unless they already agree with you. So everybody blands themselves out; and if the strongest person in the social circles pretends to be offended, why, you must pretendto be offended, too.
In America, you've got no reason to be offended by anything. That's not to say that we're worse than anybody else—I think that civilization is an illusion, a verbal fantasy conjured up by people. It's like the emperor's new clothes; civilization is about as transparent as the clothes the emperor is wearing. You're living in a jungle—maybe you smell a little better, maybe you found a way to put cloth on your body instead of mud, but things aren't that much better.

You've never seemed to care whether or not people agree with you...
It's not necessary that people agree with me, nor is it advisable. It wouldn't be good for their well-being if they agreed with me all the time. Who's to say whether I'm right or wrong?

What do you think when people try to read meanings into your lyrics?
If you want to read things into works, mine or anybody else's, go right ahead. If I fulfill a need in a person's life for something to identify with, then that makes me wonderfully functional to that person, and I'm happy to be of service. That doesn't mean that what you read into it has any bearing on reality.
Americans are really funny. Did you ever meet an American who would admit that he was smart? Nope, you won't! Americans don't want to be smart, they want to be good guys and groovy gals. But they don't want to be really stupid; they want, from time to time, to exhibit flashes of insight. And analyzing things like record jackets is a nice hobby for people who want to impress their friends with momentary flashes of insight while they're being good guys and groovy gals.

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