Zappa Plays Zappa

In an increasingly homogenised musical climate, how do you approach maintaining the legacy of a man who was, and still is, ahead of his time? <b>Joe Barton</b> talks to <b>Dweezil Zappa</b>, band leader of the Zappa Plays Zappa project, to find out how he’s keeping the memory, and music, of his father alive

Feature by Joe Barton | 01 Jun 2009

In his lifetime, Frank Zappa tirelessly produced album after album of astounding music, siphoning the profits of one project into another, in order to fulfil a commitment to his modest but loyal fanbase. After succumbing to prostate cancer in 1993, the responsibility of continuing this prolific rate of musical production has rested in the hands his family, with eldest son Dweezil leading the Zappa Plays Zappa tour, a project dedicated to both satisfying the demand for live performances amongst Zappa’s existing following, as well as bringing his music to a younger audience disillusioned by the slime oozing from their TV sets. As Zappa Jr  suggests: "Anyone who has an open mind can enjoy it.”

In fact, since the first Zappa Plays Zappa tour in 2006, Dweezil notes how he’s “seen a change in the ratio of fans”, and although “it’s not quite half and half”, there’s definitely an increasing number of younger listeners, implying that, in a climate of The X Factor, Auto-Tune, and nu-gaze/rave/metal recycling of genres, maybe we need Zappa now more than ever.

Indeed, discussions of Zappa’s music inevitably become critiques of the conventions of the music world; Zappa himself pointed out that mindless adherence to cliché has equalled success since the days of Mozart, and, now, his son considers why this mentality has survived to the modern day. “It’s all about instant gratification,” explains Dweezil. “Somebody decides: ‘Today, I want to be a musician’, and they buy some software and take some pre-composed elements, move them around like sentences in a paragraph, and they say ‘Oh, I’ve written a song now’”.

That Simon Cowell can build a lucrative business on very little musical content – consider that the result of four months’ worth of televised spectacle was a glib cover version of a Leonard Cohen song - only goes to show how, in Dweezil’s words, his father anticipated “a lot of the worst things that were yet to come”. However, before we start pointing the finger at the artists themselves, surely we the listeners are also partly to blame. Dweezil seems to agree with the idea that, while pop is great entertainment, in order to prevent stagnancy it’s important to distinguish between witnessing a real musical performance and “spending money to watch some people dance around to a backing track”. Surely this is the reason, as Dweezil observes, that his father's records “tend to have incredible longevity for people, and a repeat listening value that other records don’t seem to have”.

While he may have had long hair, Zappa was a composer, not a rock star, and his work was concerned with musical content, rather than the surface value that typifies ephemeral pop fads. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that recreating his music requires a virtuoso ensemble, and a lot of practice. For example, in order to perform Billy the Mountain, the half-hour absurdist epic from 1972’s Just Another Band From LA, Dweezil and the band had to rehearse “pretty much five days a week… for about three weeks”, including learning 3000 words of dialogue.”

However, due to the level of proficiency that they’d reached, the band had Billy the Mountain “up and running by the end of the first day, and only a week later, had the thing memorised”. The musical journey that Dweezil himself has undertaken since 2006 – be it learning new guitar-picking techniques in order to pull off the fiendish flourishes of The Black Page, or painstakingly renovating Zappa’s thirty-year old rack gear to reproduce that tone as accurately as possible - has seen his appreciation for his father’s work reach new heights: “I’ve always loved the music, but through intense study and performance my respect for what he did has grown exponentially.”

Surely, this reflects the listener’s own relationship with Zappa’s output. As Dweezil puts it: “It changes their perspective on music in general, giving them sense that there’s something more expansive possible.” Zappa has time and again encouraged rock fans to reassess their listening habits. When rhythmically complex passages are contrasted with parodies of robotic disco, Dweezil suggests it defies the listener to ask themselves this: "While pop music has plenty of things that’ll get stuck in your head, will they still be something that you’ll enjoy two years from now?”

Dweezil doesn’t think we’ll see a modern day equivalent to his father “anytime soon”, and for fans this means that the Zappa Family Trust is the only current provider of nutrition in a world of musical junk food. So what can they look forward to? “We’re hitting a period where a lot of records are reaching some big anniversaries, records that really have a place in history," considers Dweezil. “I think there’s going to be some special projects that are going to be related to those anniversaries over the next few years.”

Whilst Zappa himself once predicted that, rather by than fire and ice, the end of the world would be caused by “paperwork and nostalgia”, it’s unlikely that tributes to his early work would be sentimental. As Dweezil says: “Albums like Lumpy Gravy still sound as shocking today as they did when they came out”.

What the repeat customers to tributes like the Zappa Plays Zappa tour demonstrate is that there’s still both a demand and a space in the industry for listening experiences that are as musically uncompromising as they are entertaining. Almost poetically - and true to his father's original ethos - Dweezil argues that the project is making that space as accessible for public consumption as time and money will allow.

Zappa Plays Zappa play The Picture House, Edinburgh on 18 June.

http://www.zappaplayszappa.com