Dweezil Zappa is bringing his father’s music to New Zealand, in spite of a family feud over Frank Zappa’s legacy.
Dweezil Zappa Photo: supplied
The late Frank Zappa was a man who contained multitudes, as even a cursory listen to his catalogue will show. You'll hear biting guitar solos and orchestral fantasias, electronic collage and street-corner doo-wop, satire, salaciousness, beauty, grotesquerie and more - sometimes within a single piece of music.
Frank Zappa Photo: supplied
From 1966 until his death in 1993, he performed and recorded prolifically - under his own name, with orchestras, jazz-rock ensembles and various iterations of his band The Mothers of Invention.
For the past decade or so, the task of performing his famously idiosyncratic, often dazzlingly inventive music, has been taken on by his eldest son, Dweezil. An accomplished guitarist in his own right, Dweezil toured under the banner Zappa Plays Zappa until last year, when the Zappa Family Trust - headed by Dweezil’s youngest siblings, Diva and Ahmet - ordered him to desist, claiming he needed the trust's permission to use his father's name.
Consequently he is calling his current tour - which will be bringing him to New Zealand for a single show at Auckland's Bruce Mason Theatre next February - Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F@%k he Wants.
What can we expect to hear?
Freak Out! Photo: supplied
"This is the 50 year anniversary of my dad's first album Freak Out,” says Dweezil, on the line from Los Angeles, “so a lot of the early Mothers of Invention stuff is showcased in the first half of the show.
“When I started what was originally Zappa Plays Zappa we primarily did stuff from the era that I grew up watching my dad make music, from the middle-70s through the 80s. Over the last ten years of doing this, this is the first time we've done a pretty strong focus on the Mothers of Invention-era.
“The show is more chronological than the shows we've done before, so you really get a pretty strong time machine feel - the very first record, on through his entire career. We play about three hours, the first 40 minutes to an hour being the early Mothers stuff. And it just jumps off from there.”
How does Dweezil characterise the difference between the early Mothers and the later Zappa stuff?
"The latter stuff requires a ton of precision. The early Mothers stuff is more loose in a lot of ways, and the compositions tend to have a lot more elements that come from sound design within the production.
“He would change the speed on the tape machines and that would alter the instruments or the voices. That kind of stuff becomes a challenge when you're trying to present it live because a great deal of what we do is recreate the same timbre of instrumentation that is part of the record itself. But it's harder to do when there's certain things that are physically not possible.”
Freak Out is full of such physical impossibilities. “But for us that's one of the fun challenges, to give people a chance to hear something that is a closer representation of the album they might be familiar with.
“At that time distortion was really not on records. It was something you would really strive to avoid in the studio. The engineers were not supposed to make the red light turn on cause that was bad, but a song like 'Who Are The Brain Police?' has full-on distortion and that could only be achieved by overloading the tape machine and parts of the console to get this very square-wave distortion sound. So in recreating that sound I do it in a very similar way using the technology I use for my guitar. It has this really ratty sound but in the best way.
“But the record has so many different things on it. Elements of psychedelic pop, that crazy distortion stuff and these really bizarre experimental vocal tracks like ‘It Can't Happen Here’ where it’s multitracked voice-over stuff that’s purposely not really in any one tonal centre. It's just a bizarre thing to listen to, so that one is particularly funny to try to do onstage because you're not trying to sing in tune, you're just making these noises and things. It's very funny to do and it tests the patience of any audience.
"If you compare it to the music that was popular at the same time, Freak Out really stood out in stark relief against that and it was a very subversive and terrifying-sounding album. I like to impress upon people to think about and eleven-year-old or twelve-year-old that's got some pocket money and they go and buy the first record they've ever purchased. You bring it home and you put it on and you're parents immediately are alarmed because this does not sound like Lawrence Welk!”
Early incarnations of Dweezil’s Zappa tribute included former colleagues and contemporaries of his father. But he now consciously trying to skew the show towards a younger demographic.
"My goal was to put a band together of younger musicians that had no affiliation with my father because I wanted the ultimate message to be that this is not music from the past. This is music that is not only current, this is music of the future. So you want to be able to see that a younger generation can not only learn to play this music well but present it in a way that a new younger audience can feel like it's being made presently for them.
“If the music was only being presented with alumni, you'd be seeing a stage filled with people approaching 80 years old. That doesn't scream of current modern music but sends a message of nostalgia to many people. You need people be able to play it with an authority that are from a different generation, so it goes forward. In the same way that orchestras around the world play Beethoven and Mozart, the music remains unchanged, and it's the same with my dad's music. We don't try to adulterate it or change any of the parts to modernize them because the music as written is really the masterful thing to appreciate. You wouldn't have a Beethoven symphony with an accompaniment by Kanye West. You don't have someone in there going 'G a Beethoven G, I feel it one time!' That wouldn't help the music, you know?"
Growing up, Dweezil didn't hear much music, other than the sounds his father made or played around the house. And it wasn’t his father’s music that initially made him pick up a guitar.
"I didn't hear the radio until I was twelve. I always knew my dad's music was difficult so it wasn't the immediate place to say, ‘I know I'll start there.’ When I was twelve I started hearing The Beatles and Van Halen and Led Zeppelin and AC/DC - all of these things. So the first stuff that struck a chord with me for guitar was the music of Van Halen and the guitar playing of Randy Rhoads who was playing in Ozzy Osbourne's band. This was in 1982 and that was the most popular music in the world at the time, this rock and metal stuff.
“But oddly enough, my dad had hire a young guitar player to be in his band who was playing in a lot of complicated parts of his compositions - he called them ‘the impossible guitar parts’ or ‘the stunt guitar parts’ - and that was Steve Vai, and he gave me a few lessons, showed me some scales and picking exercises. So I started practising a lot, eight or ten hours a day.
“About six months into playing, we got a call at the house from Eddie Van Halen. He showed up at the house and I got to see how he played a lot of my favourite songs up close. This is before MTV or YouTube, back when you had to just listen to a song and imagine, ‘how could somebody play that?’ That made a big difference in my ability to progress quickly on the guitar because I could see the technique involved.
"So I got this indoctrination into the world of rock from a lot of amazing players, not the least of which was my dad as well, who would show me things and work with me. Even now I still try to learn new stuff as often as possible and do things I've never done before on the guitar."
Despite the breadth of Frank Zappa's oeuvre, he is probably best known for a small but attention-grabbing portion of his catalogue. In the 70s and 80s he achieved notoriety for songs like 'Dinah-Moe Hum' and 'Bobby Brown' that dealt with sex in explicit if ridiculous narratives, while his sole Top 40 hit was 'Valley Girl', a collaboration with daughter Moon built around the slang-uage of teenage Californian girls. Dweezil has been trying to change this perception.
"One of my biggest challenges was that I wanted to re-educate the audience to understand my dad's music more in a way that was properly reflective of what he did.
“If you've only heard the songs that may have accidentally gotten onto the radio, you're hearing the most narrow bandwidth of his work. 'Oh yeah, he's the guy with comedic narrative and the funny songs'. People almost think of him as a novelty act, almost like Weird Al Yankovic or something.
“My goal was to de-emphasise all of that stuff. In my first ten years of doing the project I rarely played any of the really humorous stuff but put the emphasis on his work as a composer and we've done a lot of the orchestral work. We've played 'G Spot Tornado' and 'Dog Breath', and a lot of his sophisticated classical works and the rock-jazz instrumental stuff. To me that's what he should be best known for."
But while Dweezil continues to carry the flag for his father's music, others appear to be placing obstacles in his path – including members of his own family. After the death in 2015 of their mother Gail, Dweezil's two younger siblings Ahmet and Diva Zappa were left in charge of the Zappa Family Trust, ostensibly charged with promoting Frank's legacy. There is currently a standoff between them and the two elder children, Dweezil and Moon.
"It doesn't make any sense. They've decided to block me from using the name Zappa because they claim that the Zappa family trust owns the trademark for the name ‘Zappa’ on its own. They would potentially have the ability to block me from using my own last name to identify myself and they have even recently claimed to own my first name, which is even more bizarre. They are doing a lot of things that are completely useless in terms of honoring the music or promoting it to a new generation.
"They keep digging their heels in and doing even more stupid stuff and lawyers are billing by the hour at over 750 dollars, so it's just pathetic.
“All of us together working with the best interests of our father would be the best set of circumstances, but they just don't see it that way. They have excluded Moon and I from any and all decisions.
“And yet they do things that are inconsistent with what my dad would have done anyway. For instance, Diva has made yoga pants with Frank's face on them and the We're Only In It For The Money album cover. So she's allowed to use my dad's image any way he wants in crass commercialization of things he wouldn't have stood for, but I can't use his name to promote music.”
The latest announcement from the Zappa Family Trust is that they are working with a production company to create a Frank Zappa hologram, which will tour with some of the former living members of the Mothers.
While all this may seem as absurd - if not as funny - as a Frank Zappa song, Dweezil remains focused on his core business.
"All I try to do is enjoy playing the music,” he says, “and presenting it to people in a live context so that it can move forward to new generations and inspire people to listen to it on a deeper level."
