Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Freaking out about Frank
Dweezil Zappa celebrates the 50th anniversary of a revolutionary album.
When Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention announced themselves with the 1966 doublealbum debut “Freak Out!”, they arrived speaking a language that was as indecipherable to the mainstream as it was mysterious even to listeners who would go on to become lifelong fans.
With intricate arrangements that aspired to the orchestral, the songs on “Freak Out!” weren’t so much sung as layered with nonsensical soliloquies, droning non sequiturs (“you’re so neat, I don’t even care if you shave your legs,” Zappa purrs on the pop parody “Wowie Zowie”) and “noises that sound like a herd of halfslaughtered cattle” (Los Angeles Herald Examiner).
Worse yet, songs that seemed most accessible, such as “Trouble Every Day” (also known as the Watts Riot song) and “It Can’t Happen Here” (which shared its title with Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel about the rise of a gladhanding fascist to the presidency of the United States) sounded like some secret, satirical dog-whistling to weirdoes and revolutionaries. Parents who feared their teenagers falling under the spell of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or James Brown now really had something to worry about.
Since summer’s 50th anniversary of what Rolling Stone includes among “the 40 most groundbreaking albums of all time,” guitarist Dweezil Zappa has been celebrating his late father with a tour that re-creates some of the best-known songs from “Freak Out!”
“Even 50 years later, it’s just one of the most subversive things to ever happen in entertainment,” Zappa says in a recent phone interview. “It stands in stark relief against anything else, and it always has. There’s nothing to describe it other than ‘Zappa music’.”
And that is where things get sticky on this tour, its title a mouthful of conflict: “50 Years of Frank: Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F@%k He Wants — the Cease and Desist Tour.”
For more than a decade Dweezil Zappa toured the world, with frequent stops in South Florida, under the name Zappa Plays Zappa. He played Frank Zappa music and sold Frank Zappa merchandise at these shows, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to his mother, Gail.
When Gail died in 2015, she left her youngest children, Ahmet and Diva, in control of the Zappa Family Trust, with Dweezil Zappa and sister Moon in lesser roles.
Relations became so strained that the trust’s attorneys told him he could no longer use the name Zappa Plays Zappa. His first suggestion, Dweezil Zappa Plays the Music of Frank Zappa, also was shot down.
“They refuse … to even have a 50-50 deal on the merch. They said, ‘Nope, 100 percent or you can’t use it.’ I said fine, f--- you guys. I’ll change the name,” Zappa says.
In December, Zappa started a PledgeMusic campaign at DweezilZappa.com seeking funds to help him fight the trust’s bid for a federal trademark of the surname Zappa. The campaign prompted another ceaseand-desist letter from the trust last week, he says.