Category: Zappa Articles

Fetchingly Clad

Germaine Greer remembers Zappa:

Once at the supermarket, Frank was sauntering along behind as we two women pushed our trolleys and minded our own business. He was fetchingly clad in a violent turquoise coloured cat-suit which was unzipped to below the navel, showing a plentiful growth of silky black hair with no sign of underwear. A pair of shoppers became fascinated by this spectacle and began following him about, the woman tittering and making loud comments. Frank stood it as long as he could, and then turned to her and roared: “Eat! My! Shit!”

Surround Sound Dweez

The Dweez is at it again:

One of the upcoming projects Dweezil plans to attempt is a surround remix of one of Frank’s classic releases:
“I can’t wait to go from the ground up on a classic record,” he says. “The problem we will encounter is the way that Frank worked. He would often take stuff from alternated takes and build something out of it, and insert it into something else. That stuff is usually not documented, so even if you have the master tape and the stereo mixes, if you go to the source tape you won’t find everything there. Our challenge will be to either find those little snippets or re-create them. If it can’t be done, then we can’t do a complete version of those classic records.

Because, you know, who wants that silly Roxy DVD released anyway, right? What the world needs now is rehashed classic albums in [expletive] surround sound!

(Pardon, is that my spit on your face?)

Zappa Press Release

Via Magic Fingers, Musibrarium Keeper and overall Strictly Genteel Person, KUR got a hold of this:

FZ Press Release 77

A press release anouncing the 77-78 tour as well as the Läther album… and since FZ is the one writing it, you’re treated to little gems like this:

“C’mon now, press person! Concentrate… I know you skimmed through another half-dozen of these stupid press kits already today… you think I like to write these things every year before we go out on the road? Let’s face it, IT’S A PAIN IN THE BUTT… look whynt’cha sort of smooth out for a minute… sort of get yerself together… think about that novel you’re going to write when you don’t have to crank these little articles out anymore… take a deep breath… that’s it… puff up yer thorax… turn the page now.”

Here’s all three pages, for your reading pleasure: 1 | 2 | 3 .

Pretentious? Moi?

Some good reads in this Zappa appreciation thread. Noteworthy quote from one DonkeyRhubarb: “Has anyone thought about what it is that is exactly wrong with being pretentious? I’m pretentious all the time, I enjoy it. I have a good job, a stable relationship, a loving family and lots of friends. So what if I sit in the pub disscusing the artistic merits of Don van Vliet every now and then. And I wear a beret, a full length brown leather jacket and smoke Giantes.”

Right Time, Right Place

One day in 1995, Joe requested a tour of the legendary Vault. “Just by looking at the names on the boxes,” Travers remembers, “I knew more about the contents of the Vault than anyone working there at the time,” including various audio experts. “The staff went back and told [Frank’s widow] Gail that I knew more about what’s in the Vault than anybody else. She said, ‘Great, he’s the Vaultmeister.'”

Z on CNN

CNN (!) has an article on Miles’ FZ biography: “I think it was the ordinariness, the emptiness of much of his experience, particularly growing up in the desert, where there was little in the way of architectural, visual stimulation or anything else,” he says. “That enabled his creative ability to come to the fore, to make up for much of what was missing in his life.”

Paglia on Zappa

Camille Paglia reviews Miles’ latest biography on Frank Zappa: “Miles calls Zappa a ‘cold nihilist’ who felt no real emotions for anyone. Along with ‘cynicism and misanthropy,’ he detects Catholic guilt and ‘deep-seated problems with women.’ Zappa was ‘stuck in a 50’s time warp’ — yet the bold feminist Germaine Greer was a Zappa fan.”
(NY Times, registration required, bugmenot to the rescue)

The Zappa Composing Method

“When composing, would he go straight to drawing notes on music-sheets, or would he use a piano/guitar and hum along until something good came along? How much of his compositions were accomplished during rehearsals, and how much was defined right away on the “drawing board”? To what degree did FZ’s “sidemen” contribute to the tunes?”
Questions, questions…