Q:Frank how did the Mothers of Invention come about? Z:you mean the name? because the record company refused to have a group on the label call the mothers, they had talked to some people with marketing expertise and had ascertained that the American public would refuse to deal with a group called the mothers so I had to had of invention on the end of it otherwise they wouldn't give us a record contract. Q: how did the band come together? z: um, by accident. q: okay, we go on to a different topic then. Z: that's good. q: okay there's any of these questions you don't want to answer, you just let me know. Z: believe me I will. Q: okay, who were some of your major musical influences? Z: there's a list of 160 names on the inside of the freak out album since the time the freak out album was released 20 years ago I think I might have added four more names to the list the names are influences both both positive and negative. I'm easily influenced by things I hate. Q: are you is easily influenced by things you like? Z: yeah but there's more stuff that I hate than stuff that I like. Q:what songs of yours do you feel show you at your best? Z: that's a matter of taste my favorites are probably the ones that make everybody else vomit, but I like things like dangerous kitchen and jazz discharge party hats. Q:can you describe... Z: or the radio is broken. Q: can you describe the rock scene in LA in the 60s 70s and then what you think of it today in the eighties? Z: in the sixties the rock scene in Los Angeles was kind of interesting the sociology of it was kind of strange everybody was more interested in dressing up then playing music so you had rampant costumery all over the place and the only time the only type of music that was successful in Los Angeles during the 60s was folk rock, everything that was birds derived or derived from a group called love which was also a big group in LA at the time, there was a little literally no market for anything with a blues based influence, it was all this flower power stupidity, and then into the 70s it got big, the scene Los Angeles dissipated, so there wasn't really any focus, it was just a major record manufacturing Center and anything that you could stick on a record that would sell is what people came to Los Angeles to do, and the 80s is an extension of that somebody figured out that because you could dress in a different costume and do punk music they could have a punk scene in Los Angeles, so that developed and you had people coming from all over the country who could probably play an instrument before they got there but as soon as they got to Los Angeles they forgot all of their chops made themselves as ugly as possible figuring that was the best way to get a record contract and that's what it is. Q: do you think that music music today not not just in LA rock-and-roll music in general is is more formula than it was say in the 60s? Z:absolutely. Q: do you think there's any feeling left in... Q: you're here on MTV should know about formula music, come on give me a break, I mean let's face it, we are talking mass formulation. Q: going from there let's go into another question what do you think about music video in general? Z: well first of all it's a bad deal for the artist because record companies expect the artists to pay for the video itself, a video with class cost about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars an entire album cost 150 thousand dollars that's 30 minutes of music roughly for one hundred fifty thousand dollars that you can listen to or four minutes of stuff that you can watch for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. the artist is expected to pay for that out of his potential royalties or out of cash out of his own pocket. this video after it is manufactured is then sent to places like MTV, MTV puts it on the air charges advertisers' time, they make a profit from selling commercial time, this money does not go to the artist, the artist is supposed to take the risk and take the flyer on this thing to promote his record with a video and the video outlets receive all of their programming material free of charge, this is not a good for the artists and it's something that should be corrected. aside from that, videos saturate very quickly, you can look at a video six times and even it's a fabulous video you've seen everything that's in there and you don't need to see it again, you're waiting for the next video that has the girl getting out of the car, midgets, chains, stuff in the ear, stuff in the face, you know, weird hair, clothes, light coming in a weird angle, zippers, you've seen it and you're ready for the next one, a record that relates to something that you feel inside, you can listen to hundreds of times, and it means something to your life. videos are disposable, they're as disposable as television commercials. in fact that's what they are, they're four minute television commercials for albums, and when you consider that a record company makes the bulk of the profit on a record, the artist does not. and you have a modern situation where the artist is being asked to not only bankroll the video and the income of the station that plays the video, it's also bankrolling the record company. this stinks. Q: have you ever there seen a music video that you liked or could appreciate? Z: yes, my favorite music video is genius of love by Tom Tom Club, because it's animated, and it's clever. Q: the show that we're doing right now for MTV, we're doing a series on different things that have influenced rock and roll music and we're doing an hour show right now on progressive rock. first of all it might take an hour to try to define what progressive rock is, no one seems to have been able to/ do you have a definition for? z: well I would say that the general definition and it's not mine, but I would presume that people would accept this definition, progressive rock is anything that doesn't sound like regular rock, regular rock is everything that sounds like itself, all songs which sound the same, everything on MTv, everything on the radio, that's rock. progressive rock is stuff that doesn't sound like that. Q: some of the bands we're going to be highlighting Frank in this show are a Procol Harum and Traffic and Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull and Genesis and ELP and yes King Crimson, Devo, obviously and then talking about you, do you have any comments on any of these bands or you...? Z:is that progressive rock? Q: well, I wouldn't say so. Q: you'd consider none of these bands progressive rock? Z:name them again I'll go with. Q: Procol Harum: Z:no Q: Traffic. Z:no Q:Pink Floyd Z:sometimes Q:Jethro Tull Z:sometimes Q:Genesis Z:sometimes Q:Emerson Lake and Palmer Z:sometimes Q:yes Z:sometimes Q:King Crimson Z:sometimes Q:Devo Z:no Q:why? Z: I wouldn't describe Devos progressive rock. Q:you Z: I wouldn't describe myself as progressive rock either. Q: how would you describe? Z: it's not even rock and roll at all, it just happens to be consumed by a rock-and-roll audience. Q: do you think that you as a musician have had any influence on any of the bands that we just the list that we just went through? Z: it's always a possibility. Q: can you, if you if you had too far if I asked you to and if you chose to answer the question could you sum up Frank Zappa in a few sentences? Z:which one? Q:Frank Zappa the industrial-strength. Z: I'm a person who likes to do what he wants to do and has worked at it for 20 years and can generally do what he wants to do whether people like it or not and what I do is design for people who like it not for people who don't and I have no desire to inflict it on people who don't want to consume it and I'm committed to turning out as much of it as possible for the people who like it is there if you like it if you don't like it there's all those other names on the list. Q:what a great attitude that's neat. Z: it's called rational thinking. Q: so few people seem to be able to do it. Z: yeah I know, I was phased out with a Republican administration. q:right, do you require playing on a both any groups or artists that you've really admired or liked? Z:well, we have a quite a long list of opening acts but I don't want to be placed in the position of being a music critic I mean for example some of the people who have opened for us have included Fleetwood, Mac, Chicago, Alice Cooper, Three Dog Night, a lot of groups that went on to be mainstays of rock and roll but I'm not a rock and roll consumer I don't listen to the radio and the only time I see MTV is if my kids are watching it occasionally I have glanced at it and recoiled and hard some of the things that I've seen on there but that's just my own personal taste you know I'm not a rock-and-roll consumer. Q: what sort of musical consumer are you Frank? Z: I carry around tapes with me traveling on the road, I listen to bulgarian folk music, Chopin, Purcell, Webern, Stravinsky, Howlin wolf, you know, I like a lot of different kinds of stuff but basically it's not rock and roll music. q: can you describe how John Lennon came to perform with you at the Fillmore? Z: no problem, a journalist knocked on my door at a hotel called one Fifth Avenue about two o'clock in the afternoon on the day of that show and he was Stanton he was waiting there at the door this man writes for the Village Voice he was waiting there at the door with a tape recorder in his hand no I just crawled out of bed my hair sticking out all over the place and my eyes were twirling like that two o'clock in the afternoon it's very early to wake up if you played two shows in a night and he says hi Frank I'd like to introduce you to John Lennon he was you know sticking the mic at me like oh I'm gonna go eat, there's something like that, so I said okay come in, and the first thing he said to me is that you're not as ugly as I thought you'd be which leads me to wonder about the strength of his glasses because I'm as ugly as I ever was I'm just as ugly now as I was then and it's a great credit to mr.Lennon that he wasn't shocked by all of this so he came in and we talked for a few minutes and I asked him whether he wanted to play with us at the concert at the Fillmore East that night and he did, and we just happen to have a recording truck there because we were recording the shows for another purpose and the tapes were made, now here's the bad part during the performance when Lennon was on stage with Yoko, we played one of my songs called King Kong and the deal that was made according to the usage of the tapes was he got to use the tapes for his purpose I got to use the tapes for my purpose, he released part of that performance on an album called some time in New York and changed the name of the song King Kong to jam rag and gave himself and Yoko writing and publishing credit on the song, now obviously this song has a melody and chord changes somebody did write it and it was not them, so, whoops. q: Oh, do you ever do anything about it? z: um not yet. q: it's so hard not to laugh. z: go and laugh, what's the difference? see what mtv does to you? you can't laugh! you have to sit there and take this stuff seriously. give yourself and the audience a break, would you? I mean are we to assume that MTV really is an extension of the Warner Brothers mentality, it is, isn't it? come on, be honest. it's that corporate Warner Brothers, come on, we're about there in the valley kind of mentality. q: (laughing) yes, there's no doubt about it. z:I know it. q: they may call it rock and roll but it's corporate America. z: that's right. first it's about pull the chain, then comes the little brown choo choo train. q:(laughing) Frank, who are your guitar heroes? z: well today my favorite is Allan Holdsworth but when I first started playing I liked Johnny Guitar Watson, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and Guitar Slim and a style that I play right now probably is more linearly derived from what guitar Slim has to do than anything else q: do you consider yourself a great guitarist? z: well I'm specialized. what I do on the guitar has very little to do with what other people do on the guitar. most of the other guitar solos that you hear performed onstage, have been practiced over and over and over again they go out there and they play the same one every night and it's really just spotless. my theory is this I have a basic mechanical knowledge of the operation of the instrument and I got an imagination and when the time comes up in the song to play a solo it's me against the laws of nature. I don't know what I'm gonna play, I don't know what I'm gonna do, I know roughly how long I have to do it, and it's a game where you have a piece of time and you get to decorate it and depending on how intuitive the rhythm section is it's backing you up you can do things that are literally impossible to imagine, sitting here, but you can see them performed before your very eyes in a live performance situation. I don't like any of the guitar solos that have ever been released on a record and I think that the real fun of playing the guitar is doing it live, not freezing it and saving on a piece of plastic someplace or putting it on a video. Q:so every night then is spontaneous for you, huh? Z:absolutely. Q:he keeps it fun? well think of it the other way, you know what if you had to play exactly the same notes every night and that like punching a clock. (mm-hmm) well who needs that crap. Q: again I mean you know I'll make a statement that I made to one of your earlier statements it's so refreshing to hear somebody talk like that. Z:well most people won't take that chance because I'll take the chance to go out there and make a mistake I will take that chance for the privilege of doing something unique one time only live in front of an audience because it's that's one of the reasons why the audience has come to see the concerts over and over again for the last 20 years because they know that the concert even though you may be playing songs off the record as a unique situation it's only going to happen at one time they're going to be jokes happening onstage that relate to that particular audience and they're going to be solos played during that show that will never happen again have never happened before will never happen again so it's something special just for the people who bought the tickets to that show and it's probably one of the reasons why the bootlegs of these concerts have done so well over the last couple of decades there's just there's hundreds of the things out and that's must be one of the reasons why people buy them although you shouldn't buy them. Q:do you think Frank that most artists are just afraid to stretch themselves musically afraid to take any sort of a chance at all? Z: well MTV is helping with that syndrome because all video outlets and that's basically the focus of the music today as whether or not what you do is video acceptable let's let's look at it realistically if a person likes music that is not enough in the 80s you can like music and you can play music you can sing you can dance you can have all these things going for you but you're not even going to get to first base unless you have science fiction hair and diagonal zippers on your clothes forget it you go to a record company to make a deal and the first thing they're going to do is look at your bubble isset a picture if they don't like that they won't even listen to the tape in fact they don't even care about the tape because they can always get Trevor Horn to fix it and so after Trevor is fixed it and they've approved your publicity photo then you get the video treatment and everything gets formulated according to the Warner Brothers aesthetic it goes onto MTV and it goes on to any other competitor that hasn't been bought by MTV yet and the group gets exactly one chance to do one thing and their musical lifespan is in direct proportion to the interest that the audience has in the way they look because the whole thing is based on a visual merchandising so what happened to music? Q:what do you what do you think it will take to to get us back to a point where music is music and experimental and people are willing to take chances? Z:well it's not going to happen. Q:really? Z:yeah Q:that's sad. Z:well. Q: a frightening thought. Z: tough tuckus, the damage has been done and unless somebody realizes and they and it has to be admitted and it has to be advertised and supported on this medium that what you are seeing on MTV is merely advertising for product which was designed as product not as music only as product the song is written so it's a visual song a guy sits down a figures it out how many midgets can we get in here how many girls how many lip close-ups when do you take the glasses off and the water comes out of your face you know you figure it all out and then that's your product and that is not writing a piece of music. Q: do you think do you think that people are who are entering the music business today are more concerned about being rock and roll stars than musicians? do you think that's part of the process? well that's not part of the problem, that's the way the world really is. there's very few people who ever went into pop music who did because they went into it as an art form, they did it because they wanted to be a star. there is a strong desire to be famous, to be rich, to have all the cocaine you want, to stick up your nose, have a chainsaw to chop up your hotel room and naked girls running around with, you know, leather things with points on the wrists and stuff, that's what everybody wants, you know, and they should have that. it's just get it out of my face but they should have as much of it as they want, that's got nothing to do with music.
