Frank Zappa was a genius. Dweezil Zappa is making sure we don't forget
Dweezil Zappa is headed to Phoenix to launch a tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of two career-defining albums that took his legendary father’s music to a wider mainstream audience than acts as willfully eccentric as Frank Zappa tend to reach — “Apostrophe,” his only Top 10 entry on the Billboard album chart, and “Roxy & Elsewhere,” which hit No. 27.
The Rox-Postrophy Tour is the latest step in a musical journey Dweezil started in 2006 with Zappa Plays Zappa: Tour de Frank to celebrate the legacy his father left when he died in 1993 of prostate cancer.
At the time, Dweezil felt a need to redirect our focus from his father’s politics and quirky sense of humor to the genius at work in his music.
Dweezil has done countless tours since then exploring different aspects of his father’s catalog. And after 18 years, he’s feeling pretty good about the progress he’s made in not only preserving that legacy but taking it to audiences far too young to have experienced it firsthand, as he told The Arizona Republic in the course of this exclusive interview.
Dweezil Zappa promises a very different 'St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast'
What can you tell me about the tour?
We're playing some things on this tour that we've never played before, focusing mainly on the "Roxy" and "Apostrophe" albums, which is why the tour is called Rox-Postrophy. But we're not playing either album in its entirety. And we're playing versions of songs from those records that may be lesser known.
It might be something we've found from a concert where the song might have been played for the very first time, so you hear an arrangement that became something very different later on, but when it was first written and performed, it sounded this way. 'St. Alfonzo' has a lot of different harmonies and other parts in it, because we're taking it from a very early version performed in, I think, 1973, before the record came out.
There's a lot of mixing and matching of different arrangements. And I’m adjusting things to work for the instrumentation in this particular band, which is different because there's probably 12 or 13 songs where there'll be two drummers, which is the same kind of thing that was happening on the Roxy tour when my dad was performing.
So all the changes you've made are based on an approach your dad took at some point?
Yeah. I always use my dad's versions as the reference point. I never take a song and just completely rearrange it and do whatever I want. That being said, I might take parts of arrangements from one or two versions or even three versions of a song and make it into a version that's never been performed live. But they all stem from versions that my dad did in one way or another.
The other thing that's different is that there's a lot more playfulness in the material that’s in the show and also within the latest version of the band, because the two newest members are younger than the rest of the band by, in some cases, more than a decade.
Zach Tabori, the singer-guitarist who also plays drums, started his journey in Zappa music at 12 or 13 watching my performance of "Punky's Whip" from 2006 on YouTube. So all these years later, he's in the band, and his first big request was to do "Punky's Whips," which we haven't played since 2006.
So it is the embodiment of the reason I started playing my dad's music to begin with, which was to have a younger generation discover it, be interested in it, want to play it and get excited about it. It's fun to play that song again after all this time, because he's so into it. And it's the most rocking version that has probably ever been set forth.
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Putting the focus on Frank Zappa the composer, bandleader and guitarist
The last time we spoke, you said, "After he passed away, I noticed there were a lot of people that really weren't focusing on his music." Do you feel these tours have helped?
I know that I feel good about what I've been able to do in terms of putting the focus on the music since 2006. And we've played all kinds of things within his catalog. The focus has definitely always been on him as a composer, as a guitarist, as a band leader, and way less on the humor. But as I was saying, the choice of material in this show lends itself to a little bit more playfulness. So there is humor in the show.
Is it hard to find musicians who not only have the chops to pull this music off, but share your passion enough to put the effort into getting it right?
Yeah, for sure. The thing is, you might find people who could potentially have the technical skills, but they don't have the right personality to even be on the tour bus. You have to look for the person that enjoys the music but also enjoys staying in their lane. If you're working with an orchestra, each section has a role and they stay in that role. The cello guy is not to play the flute part.
That's what my dad was always dealing with — people that would want to draw attention to themselves by changing what their role was, playing things they're not supposed to play, changing the harmony, changing a chord or doing something that is not a written part. And once they started thinking they can do that, they didn't last. My dad's famous quote was, "Window or aisle, how would you like to return home?"
I've had my own fair share of that with different musicians that could stay in their lane for a while but then became more interested in trying to draw attention to themselves. Some people just go down that path and think it's all about them. And it's like, "Well, window or aisle?"
Dweezil on developing a deeper understanding of Frank Zappa music
You've been doing this for almost 20 years. Has it given you a deeper understanding of your father's music? Has anything surprised you?
I've certainly got a deeper understanding. I learn more about it all the time. The thing that is always amazing is that there's so much variety in what he did. There's a depth and variety to the arranging, and that's the real skill in this. We only have 12 notes in Western music, and arranging them rhythmically and harmonically in so many different ways is really the most underappreciated skill that my dad had.
He would take songs and rearrange them 12, 15, 20 times. So that's the part I marvel at. He had unlimited creativity when it came to that. And he was able to use certain kinds of harmonization that nobody else would be able to really make work.
We were transcribing "Big Swifty" from the master tapes and listening to individual tracks when we realized this dense harmony in one section had all 12 tones used at once. And it's not just a cacophony of sourness. It's this amazing textural combination that works because of how it's orchestrated in different octave ranges. It's hilarious to know that every single note is being played at the same time.
Dweezil Zappa on the role 'Apostrophe' played in the Frank Zappa legacy
That's amazing. Do you feel that doing this has made you a better musician?
For sure. I definitely didn't know as much as I know now. I'm not claiming to be a theory wizard or expert, but I definitely know more about the sounds that my dad favored, the sounds that I favor, the sounds I like to hear, what they're made of and how to be able to communicate that to other musicians and use them as colors and textures in improvisational ways.
Could you talk about what "Apostrophe" and "Roxy & Elsewhere" meant in the context of your father’s legacy?
They're two of the more popular records. From a listener's perspective, they have a very good through line and the styles are varied but they sit squarely in the rock/funk/blues area, which was pretty popular in the '70s. So the arrangements and instrumentation give you that classic feel.
It has cool, funky clavinet and Rhodes and Wurlitzer piano with great horn arrangements and ripping guitar. You have some stories in the songs that are entertaining, fun and funny, but you also have just brilliant writing and musicianship. It's the era that's really my favorite. I love the timbre of the instrumentation, the playing style, the focus on the rock/funk/blues elements. It just ticks all the boxes for me.
It also makes it fun to play that stuff live. But we also go beyond that to earlier eras of his career and later eras to give you a pretty wide palette and put things in context.
"Apostrophe" was your dad’s most commercially successful album. I know you were busy turning 5 that year, but do you get the sense that it mattered to him?
I think he was happy that it afforded him the ability to do more things. The way he operated was a tour might be a month-long, but he would rehearse a band for three months, and he would record every show. So typically, he lost between $300,000 and $500,000 every tour because of the expenses involved in doing what he needed to do to be able to make records from it.
Back then, if you wanted to record every show, you'd bring a recording truck, which is really the full trailer from a Mack truck. You'd also have trucks filled with cables that would connect to the venue. Those cables weighed a lot, and you'd have to bring them in and out of the venue.
Now you can do it with a laptop. But back in the day, almost nobody matched what he was doing in terms of recording his own shows and making material out of them.
Dweezil says his concerts push Frank Zappa songs in new directions
What does it mean to you to preserve your father's legacy this way?
For me, it was an opportunity to see if it could be done one time as an opportunity for people to hear the music in a curated way that brings more focus to the things that were the least understood elements in his music.
But I was able to continue having opportunities to keep drilling down on that concept and format, and in doing so, over the years, people grew accustomed to the playing and musicianship in my band, which really is an apples-to-apples comparison. It's commensurate with what he set out to do.
We used his guidelines and his standards as our own. So people are not just hearing a cover version of a song they were familiar with from their youth. Those songs live on in new versions that still have the same built-in attributes but there's a second-generation lineage to it.
In a way, the music has become my own, in some people's eyes, and they like the versions we do just as much as the classics. In some cases, they like some of our versions better because we’re pushing certain songs in directions that they never had a chance to go. And that's sort of an oddball thing that has come to fruition from just the length of time being out there.
There's a shift in this thing where it's people viewing it as not just Frank Zappa music, but Zappa music. I'm part of the element that creates Zappa music, and they’ve become synonymous, in that way, for the people that enjoy our performances.
Dweezil Zappa plays Frank Zappa in Phoenix
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 1.
Where: Celebrity Theatre, 440 N. 32nd St., Phoenix.
Admission: $39-$225.
Details: 602-267-1600, celebritytheatre.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Dweezil Zappa thrives on spinning Frank Zappa's music forward