Can You Play It Backwards?

Funny little anecdote about Zappa’s typical way of dealing with musicians. Act one goes like this:

Just to be sure that Mr. Piano had a fair chance at the reading part of the audition, Frank gave him 2 pieces of music to work on a week before the audition was to take place. One of these pieces is called “The Black Page” which was pretty dense with notes and a real challenge to play. Challenge enough that Mr. Piano kind of gave up learning it as precisely as needed and decided he was good enough to wing it during the audition instead.

Fatal mistake #1! Keep reading for a nice twist at the end.

(Via Paul Carr)