The Landfill Chronicles—Chapter 3: The Last Interview with Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa’s Last Interview — The Landfill Chronicles
Chapter 3
Part 1: “Meeting Frank”
The headline of my Tower Pulse! Magazine cover feature on Frank Zappa in the August 1993 issue reads: “20th-century popular music’s philosopher-king…has inspired independence movements in Eastern Europe and lampooned stupidity in the West. Now, he faces his most serious challenge.”
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TROUBLE EVERY DAY
In early April 1993 three months after being assigned an exclusive interview with Frank, I get the call and I finally make the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I plan to stay in the Southland for five days in case things don’t go as planned. Frank’s publicist Mark Holdom explains to me that there are some days when Frank is so sick he can’t get out of bed. He’s in the late stages of prostate cancer. We arrange for the interview to take place on a Tuesday afternoon at 2, but Mark warns me not to be surprised if it has to be postponed. Call ahead, he tells me. I do, and I’m asked if I can come a little later, perhaps at 4? Sure thing. I’m told I’ll have an hour.
Traffic is light on the Los Angeles freeways that day as I listen to Frank’s music. While driving, I’m intent on the song “Trouble Every Day” from the first Mothers of Invention album, Freak Out!, released in 1966. With wailing harmonica and turmoiled bass in the background, Frank’s lyrics on “Trouble Every Day” ominously and prophetically tumble out: “It’s the same as the nation/Black and white discrimination/…and all that mass stupidity/That seems to grow more every day/Each time you hear some nitwit say/He wants to go and do you in/’Cause the color of your skin/Just don’t appeal to him/No matter if it’s black or white/Because he’s out for blood tonight.”
Written by Frank while the Watts riots were escalating out of control one year earlier in 1965, the song is eerily appropriate nearly thirty years later on this warm spring afternoon when the city is once again bracing for the worst — awaiting the outcome of the second Rodney King beating trial. In the first trial in 1992, a jury acquitted four LAPD officers on charges of excessive force even though the brutal pummeling was captured on video. Within hours of the verdict, the Los Angeles racial riots erupted — lasting six days, killing 63 people and injuring 2,383.
This year the federal government is prosecuting a separate civil rights case, with the verdict coming any day.
I get off the Ventura Freeway at Studio City, stop for a burrito because I’m running early and then drive up Laurel Canyon Boulevard into the Hollywood Hills to get to Frank’s house. I’m nervous as I ring the bell while a video surveillance monitor is focused on me. Mark lets me in, leads me to the dark, but comfortable viewing room and tells me Frank will be with me shortly.
After waiting a few minutes, Frank slowly enters. Casually dressed in blue sweats, turquoise t-shirt and a loosely fitting gray sweater, he smiles, lights up the first of several Marlboros and shakes my hand. Today, he says, he’s feeling OK. He immediately puts me at ease with a calmness and generosity that I was not prepared for from an artist notoriously reputed to eat journalists for lunch.
For the next four hours — in the video room and in his Utility Muffin Research Center studio where he and his assistants daily feast on popcorn — he is animated at times, fervently enjoying himself as we effortlessly interweave musical matters with politics. However, as a consequence of his illness, there are moments when Frank, his dark hair streaked with gray and tied in a tight ponytail, visibly tires as if his batteries have temporarily faded. But then we take off into another area of music and/or politics where he has strong opinions and he rejuvenates.
Although he’s exhausted, his desire to put his house in order is foremost on his mind. Frank is preparing his catalog for posterity and to provide a legacy for his family. After all, the irascible and iconoclastic 52-year-old has outdistanced most of his peers in the business by his unflagging commitment to both adventurous music and social critique.
I tell him about my driving experience with “Trouble Every Day.” I ask him, why is the song still so poignantly relevant? Frank fields the question with aplomb. “Nothing has changed,” he says. “We have the same racial hatred, the same unwillingness to face the causes of racial unrest. We’ve had years to examine the causes of the Watts riots, but no one has done anything about it. There were studies and reports and conclusions then, just like there were studies and reports and conclusions reached after last year’s riots. There’s a certain type of American adolescent behavior that hasn’t gotten any better since the sixties.”
Frank pauses then adds to his observation: “There’s a distinctively American kind of stupidity that never goes away. Scientists believe that the universe is made of hydrogen because they claim it’s the most plentiful ingredient. I claim that the most plentiful ingredient is stupidity. There’s far more stupidity than hydrogen on a molecule-to-molecule basis.”
ACCIDENTAL ROCK ICON
This opens our initial 90-minute conversation. At first it feels daunting to be talking with the legendary and controversial artist who has masterly experimented with an array of genres, including rock, doo-wop, jazz, poo, avant-garde and contemporary classical music. He’s a composer of concept albums and a terrific high-charged guitarist. But with the tape on, our talk proceeds comfortably in his dark video-viewing room with a television screen and several rows of video tapes lining the wall in front of us. “I never had any intention of writing rock music,” Frank says while sitting leisurely in his chair with a bright red kilim-like covering. “I always wanted to compose more serious music and have it be performed in concert halls, but I knew no one would play it. So, I figured that if anyone was ever going to hear anything I composed, I’d have to get a band together and play rock music. That’s how I got started.”
If ever a long-term plan paid off, it has to have been Frank’s. His list of official accolades and honors seems limitless. Then there are the more official accolades and honors. Renowned conductor Kent Nagano called him a genius. Czech playwright and former president Václav Havel wanted to make Frank Czechoslovakia’s special ambassador to the West on trade, culture and tourism but reluctantly yielded to pressures from the George Bush administration to ditch the idea. Frank won a Grammy in 1987 for his Synclavier-driven Jazz From Hell album, and he was chosen to play John Cage’s controversial and perhaps most famous piece 4'33" for the star-studded Cage tribute album, A Chance Operation.
He was recently inducted into the Playboy Music Hall of Fame as its 43rd member, and in the year prior to our meeting Guitar Player published Zappa!, a full-length comprehensive overview of his career. His works have been performed by a number of esteemed 20th-century ensembles. Pierre Boulez commissioned him to score a symphonic work which resulted in the album The Perfect Stranger: Boulez Conducts Zappa.
The European contemporary music group Ensemble Modern commissioned him to put together a concert’s worth of his orchestral works for the Frankfurt Festival in 1992, and in February of this year Lincoln Center in New York City presented an evening of Frank’s serious music in its Great Performers series.
Even the cartoon sit-com series The Simpson’s creator Matt Groening is on record as saying “Frank is my Elvis.”
Not bad for a guy who began his musical career as a drummer in a San Diego r&b group called the Ramblers in 1956. Frank jokes, “I played one or two gigs with them, but I wasn’t very good so they fired me.” Then he recorded parody and instrumental doo-wop tunes in Cucamonga, California, and leased them to record companies such as Original Sound in Los Angeles in the early ’60s.
Zappa’s first important record as a composer came in 1963 with the classic West Coast doo-wop tune “Memories of El Monte” released under the name The Penguins. But soon after, he launches into what he’s best known for — leading the charge into the experimental and distinctively weird rock music of the late ’60s with his seminal band of renegades and freaks, the inimitable Mothers of Invention.
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Next week:
Chapter 3, part 2: ”The Formative Years”
“How can I take any of this seriously?”