Dweezil Zappa – Conduit To Excellence (INTERVIEW)

Carrying the torch of a music legend’s legacy would be a complex job for anyone. Dweezil Zappa though has taken on his father’s musical legacy with a headfirst commitment to ensure his enormous catalogue is discovered by a new generation and ultimately, not forgotten. Dweezil’s band, Zappa Plays Zappa, is not simply a tribute to the music of his father, but an effort to share his father’s work and spark new interest with each tour. Dweezil is a very busy man. He is currently touring with his band supporting and celebrating the 40th anniversary of Frank’s Roxy & Elsewhere, planning next year’s Dweezilla – a guitar boot camp for musicians, conducting what some call a Master class of guitar lessons before most performances and putting the finishing touches on a unique collaborative new album. Needless to say, Dweezil is a motivated, dedicated man who is having fun along this musical journey that he’s created. Dweezil gave up some of his precious time during a recent stop in Boston to speak with Glide Magazine.

Zappa Plays Zappa is currently on tour and celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Roxy & Elsewhere. How do you choose which of Frank’s albums that you are going to thrust into the spotlight?

We don’t always do a full record. This is only the second time that we have. The first time we did, we did a full tour of the Apostrophe record back in 2010. This is the only other full record that we’ve done. Giving the people an idea as to what they might see at a show, playing a full record, is appealing from a marketing standpoint. Frank’s shows always had this feel that anything could happen at anytime, so we wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose that kind of thing to avoid making it feel that everything was completely scripted, which it really isn’t.  I like the Roxy album and its forty years old, so we thought it was a perfectly good thing. Plus, Gibson Guitars just recently made a replica of Frank’s Roxy SG. So all of it kind of fell into play to make that a good choice to choose one record to go ahead and promote. Typically, I think the audience likes to see a variation in what that is, but this show is actually, as we’ve been doing it, the record itself has a lot of variation from song to song but there’s some really good comedic moments that happen throughout the whole thing and it keeps developing its own tour folklore.

What challenges do you and your band face with learning your father’s music for a tour?

All of the band members read music and that’s beneficial for a number of reasons. They can learn stuff and pinpoint where mistakes may be coming from. If we play a song and somebody has forgotten a part, typically somebody has all of the music written out, except for the guitar. We’ve got the score for all of the rest of the instrumentation, so if there’s multiple horn parts – they can quickly go back through their notes, find the notes, read it and play it as opposed to having to  rewind and learn each note one by one – which is what I have to do for everything because I can’t read the music. Reading music is a great skill to have and I wish that I had it. But I just don’t have time to devote to doing it. Ultimately, the members in the band have the desire to play the music as it’s written, have a good attitude and have a good time doing it.

My dad would encounter issues with musicians that would want to get into his band so that they cold get some kind of street credibility of some sort to say that they played with Frank Zappa. And people would assume that they must be good. People would audition just to say that they did so, but you could be terrible and audition for something. Point is, some people try to join a band like this so that they can bring their skills to the forefront and do what Frank would call a “Body Commercial” to say, “Look at me. Look at what I can do” and then take that somewhere else.

For our auditions we would purposely weed out those people that had that kind of attitude. The people who come in to audition for us are given zero notice on what they have to learn and are given two or three really hard things to play that might take about forty hours to learn. So if you can do it and show that you have that dedication, that’s very different. The person who wants to do the “Body Commercial” wants to do the least amount of work possible just to get the opportunity to do the “Body Commercial”.

Is it pretty clear when people come in to audition and they’re not fans of Frank’s music?

Oh yeah. We’ve had people come in before and they’re given some material to prepare and they’ve not bothered to learn any of it. They’ll come in and say, “Let’s just to a jam in the key of…” and nope, it’s not even going to happen. One guy came in and said, “Aw yeah. I learned all of the stuff. “I said, “You did?” And then he replied, “Well, I listened to it in the car.”

ZPZ has thrown a cover song into the set list from time to time. Is that scripted?

Sometimes it just happens but other times it becomes part of the show. Earlier, during the first week of the tour, we played “Back in Black” a few times and did it as kind of a goof because we were at rehearsal just messing with it and Pete Jones, who is part of the crew, was singing the song but he was just singing nonsensical lyrics. It sounded like he was singing it, because it’s always so hard to understand Brian Johnson anyway – that it just sounded like the song. He would say random things and it was funny to us and we brought it into the show. We did a few times but after a while the joke does wear off because you’ve got to have some of the real lyrics there. We’d at least do the proper chorus.

What’s your objective of having the guitar class before the show?

The whole idea was that so many people would come up to me and ask how I do it. How do you learn this stuff? I thought that maybe I should put together a school to show, not necessarily how to play this music, but to show the steps that I took to developing the skill set to do it. For the past four years, we’ve done this camp called Dweezilla and this is some of the stuff that I teach during my classes at Dweezilla. The last one that we did was an intense three-day course of guitar studies. So, we try to bring the feel of the camp to the people for about 90 minutes and it gives me a better idea as to what people are interested in and what I might do to continue the school. It seems to be fairly universal. When you get to an intermediate level, people want to be using more colors in their playing and sometimes, in a theoretical approach there are certain things that people tend to avoid because it doesn’t apply to the music that they make. But, really anything can apply. You just need to be willing to experiment. My way of going about that is probably very different than the academic way. What I may or may not be telling people to try out is that its not really based on an academic approach, so much as trying to have fun figuring out which intervals appeal to you.

It tends to let people have more fun with their practice and open up. Practice isn’t always fun. When it is something that you like practicing, you may get good at the one thing you always practice, but you never really improve beyond that because you’re not practicing anything new. It’s hard to improve if you’re not going to work on the weak spots. It’s all part of the big process of learning. I like to share some things that I find useful.

What is something that you’ve taken away from the pre-show classes or the camp? What’s something that you’ve learned?

The best thing for me is when you’re teaching, you have a tendency to learn a lot to because you tend to put into practice some of the things that you’re trying to explain. Sometimes you come up with a new perspective on how to explain it and it leads you to a another way of using the information that you’re already sharing. I’m just pretty open-minded and adaptable to the situation. Every time that I hold a class, it helps me to focus on specific things that are most helpful to a larger group of people.

The funny thing is, I’ve had groups as large as 35 to 40 people and as small as one or two and people are afraid to ask questions. And that’s funny to me because I would be the opposite. It’s weird. When people are in a group setting, they don’t want to feel like they know less than the others, so they’d just rather stay quiet. I give them every opportunity, telling them that it’s their time and to ask as many questions as possible. There were kids here today who graduated from Berklee and know way more theory than I do and they’re really shy. I’ll ask for someone to come up and play some chords, and there are people there with their guitars, and nobody raises their hands. So I’ll just have to point and say – “You! Come up here.”

Do you think there’s some sort of intimidation factored in to their reluctance?

I don’t know. I guess that could be part of it, but I’ve never viewed things that way. I’ve had a chance to play with some of my idols, some really great players and I know that there’s a human side to all of that stuff. So, I don’t put on any display of being any better than my guests. I try to make it as friendly and as open as possible. There’s no pomp and circumstance to anything that I do.

Is Dweezilla set up for 2014 yet?

We haven’t decided on the location. I’d like to do it in a new one. I want to make it even easier for people to get there. We’ve done four years at the Full Moon Resort, which is a great place, but if you fly in from across the country or from out of the country and then you get into New York City, you’ll still need to drive for a couple of hours and it’s not simple to find because it’s out in the wilderness. It might be better to have it closer to the airport that you’d land at.

You mentioned the Gibson Roxy SG. When was that unveiled and can you tell me more about the guitar itself?

I think about four months ago, but it wasn’t to any grand announcement. There are only about 400 of them and they pretty much all sold right away. It’s a great guitar. I worked really hard with them to keep it affordable as possible especially for an artist series guitar. It’s very well made and has a lot of character and a lot of different sounds that you can get out of it. It plays great as it has super low action, which is really nice.

How did the reproduction process go?

Gibson measured everything that could be measured. The version of the guitar that we chose to recreate didn’t exist in the same way it did before. We had to go based on some photographs for some stuff because the actual guitar got damaged and so the front of the guitar had a mirror pick guard on it and different electronics in it than it did in ’74. From the pictures and all the video that we have of that guitar we were able to make sure that we had the right details from that era. It just has a couple of simple things on it, like two switches. One will make the humbuckers a single coil and in the rhythm position, they’re single-coil humbucking which is good ‘cuz you can get that bright sound without all the noise from the lights.

That makes me think of the Brian May pickup options – where you can go parallel or out of phase.

Yeah, right. This guitar has the out of phase selector so you can get that Brian May type of sound.

You’re carrying on your father’s legacy with Zappa Plays Zappa and you’re doing quite well. Did you feel some type of responsibility or was it a cosmic push to do so?

I noticed that people that were my age or younger did not know anything about my dad’s music. People would say “who is Frank Zappa?” when asked if they had heard a certain song. So I thought, I don’t want to see the music disappear in my lifetime. I didn’t feel that the music was being brought to people’s attention in a way that was motivating anyone to do anything. I thought that at least I’d put something together, so I can feel good knowing that there was some effort made. We didn’t know if it was going to be ongoing or just a one-time thing.

I studied the music for two years before I even put the band together. When people heard about what it was going to be, I expected the typical response that it was going to be horrible. I knew I was going to hear that, because I love to say all types of negative things about relatives of famous people. I’m sure they thought I’d ruin the music and Frank would be rolling over in his grave. I knew that wasn’t going to be the case because all we had to do was play the music, the way that I knew we could and the music would speak for itself. We really work hard to play the music the right way.

Most people would assume that I wouldn’t want to put myself into direct comparison with my more famous father, but in doing so, it’s brought attention to my guitar playing in a way that people probably would have dismissed in any other set of circumstances. The direct comparison puts it at a commensurate level with what they can already see from the other music. They may not realize what I can do, so it turns it into a positive.

When going into this, it was never a focus or consideration, is that there’s a lot of video now, where people can see us doing things that they couldn’t see Frank doing. So we’re able to put together things that would have never been able to be seen in a live situation because it wasn’t photographed or filmed. In some cases, some of the versions of the songs we do become more known than the original versions. There’s a weird twist in it. People get to know some of our versions more than they know the original versions. In a way, as it progresses into the future, there will be a generation a people who will know this music because we’re playing it. We’re the direct version for them. They won’t even make the connection to Frank’s version and they’ll just stick with this version. I thought that we’d be the conduits for them to get to Frank’s music. But there are people who hear our version, then they hear Frank’s and they tell us they like our version more. The only way that I can explain that is that they’ve had the chance to see and hear it live.

Our keyboardist of three years, Chris, who is only 26 years old, had never heard any of Frank’s music until he saw our DVD. He said that as soon as he saw the video, it opened up things for me because there was a void in music. He felt that he had to learn the music and be in the band. That’s the exact reason why this project exists.

I don’t think that there’s a difference between a kid being 13 in 1966 and hearing Freak Out and a 13-year-old kid in 2013 hearing Freak Out. You’re still going to get the same reaction of, “What is this? There’s nothing that sounds like this.” And there’s still nothing that sounds like this. The music sounds like it’s from the future. Nobody took that path and it’s timeless. My experience of growing up with the music was the same thing. I heard pretty much only my dad’s music until I was about 12. When I heard other music, I wondered, “Where’s the rest of it?” There was not any other big arrangement with the details and all that kind of stuff. Music seemed too simple because I was used to hearing all this other stuff. I know that, for certain people, when they hear what’s possible, it changes their perspective on what music can be or should be for their whole life. It’s strange but there is that clique of people that this just becomes their thing.

So the Roxy tour ends in March?

Yes. But as far as I know there might be some events that go on through the summer of 2014.

I was going to ask if you were looking forward to taking a break.

Well there will be little breaks along the way, but I’ll also be doing the Experience Hendrix Tour. And I hope to be doing some of my own music at some point. There’s a song that we play before the show that will be released soon. It’s called “Dinosaur”. It’s the last song that’s played for the house music before we get on the stage. It’ll be released on a Dweezilla record. The idea is that we would have a collaborative recording of all the instructors that were at the camp. It started as the idea that I would do a song and have everybody who was an instructor play on the song. But then I thought everybody should do a song. It’s a guitar record with lots of guitar players but different writing perspectives because everybody has got their own style. It’s actually a pretty interesting combination of tunes. Everybody plays on each other’s tunes and it’s interesting to see how everybody’s playing fits or if they all sound like themselves on each track. For me, I felt I was much more schizophrenic where I sounded different on every solo that I was doing because I was trying to fit it to the style of music of each track. I think it will be very interesting.