Dweezil Zappa______
On reworking Hot Rats for a new era, and ignoring his dad’s comedy songs…
As Dweezil Zappa dives deep into the DNA of his father Frank’s classic album Hot Rats, he tells Prog about the nightmarish challenge of playing the record on guitar, why he won’t play the comedy songs, and the fight for the right to perform the Zappa catalogue.
“My goal was always to focus on his work as a composer, as a guitarist, as a bandleader, and show the depth and the variety in the music.”
1969 was a momentous year for Frank Zappa. On September 5, he and his wife Gail celebrated the birth of their son Dweezil. Then, on October 10, Zappa released his second solo album, a fearsome blend of instrumental jazz rock fusion called Hot Rats.
Fifty years later, Dweezil is bringing the album back to life, playing the full record on tour with the band that he likes to call his “rocking teenage combo”. In honour of his father, Dweezil aims to produce a DNA-accurate audio presentation of Hot Rats onstage.
“It’s just a really cool-sounding recording,” says the guitarist. “Part of what we do when we go out is that we take into consideration the actual sound that was used on the recordings and try to recreate that the best that we can, so it really has a time machine quality.”
As much as he’s building a musical time machine every night, Dweezil doesn’t have the same instrumentation in his group as the band that his father used to make Hot Rats, which means Dweezil’s guitar has an awful lot of musical real estate to cover. Even before the first Zappa Plays Zappa tour in
2006, Dweezil had spent years working to absorb his father’s music and intimidating virtuosity.
“The goal was always to learn the composed music and be able to play things on guitar that weren’t meant for guitar,” says Dweezil. “That’s where the technical side of things really came into play, because the biggest challenge with a lot of my dad’s music is there are a lot of intervals of fourths and, on the guitar, those are very difficult to plan out on the fretboard. It makes the picking with the right hand really messed up as well as the left-hand fingering, so you add complex rhythms into difficult-to-reach intervals, and then you basically have a nightmare on your hands.”
In the late 60s when Hot Rats arrived, the first wave of fusion was on the rise, with Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and
The Tony Williams Lifetime leading the charge. Zappa brought in Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris to play electric violin on Hot Rats, which is easy to read as a precursor to Jerry Goodman and Jean Luc
Ponty’s role in Mahavishnu Orchestra shortly thereafter, and the album taps into that spirit of throwing jazz improvisation into a rock context.
For Dweezil, this has meant getting to grips with his father’s approach to improvising.
“Because Hot Rats is such a wellknown album, when I’m going to be playing solos, I don’t want it to take a total left turn and have it not feel like it is part of the overall landscape,” he says. “This is another one of those things where I have to spend a lot of time to learn more of my dad’s musical vocabulary, his tendencies that he would go for in solos. I’m not necessarily going to play note-for-note solos, but I’m going to play things that are based on things that he would have played knowing what I know about his playing.”
In the modern era of three-minute, three-chord pop songs, Hot Rats is a reminder of a time when audiences embraced artists who were willing to push the envelope. While Dweezil believes that long-time fans of his father’s music will embrace
Hot Rats Live, he wants to reach out beyond the boundaries of dedicated Zappa devotees.
“Being that we’re wanting to have this music reach a new audience as well, the idea of a largely instrumental album being the core of the show, some could say that would be risky because some people just don’t have the patience for instrumental music,” says Dweezil. “But I think the music and the melodies are strong. I mean, a song like Peaches En Regalia is really a master composition, it really is an amazing piece of music.”
Frank Zappa often seemed to take a mischievous delight in being provocative and outrageous with his music, but Dweezil is keen to keep the spotlight on his prodigious talent as a composer. He’s not too keen on performing the more comedic side of his father’s output.
“One of the reasons I started doing the whole tour to begin with was that it started to appear that my dad’s music was being relegated to the novelty music category because the stuff that did get on the radio generally were songs with a comedic narrative,” says Dweezil. “Valley Girl, Don’t Eat
The Yellow Snow, Dancin’ Fool or Cosmik Debris, that little handful of songs, if that’s all that you’ve ever heard you start to get the impression that’s the only stuff that my dad ever wrote. That, in actual fact, is a very small percentage of the music. My goal was always to focus on his work as a composer, as a guitarist, as a bandleader, and show the depth and the variety in the music.”
So don’t expect to hear Dweezil play anything as lewd as Jewish Princess anytime soon. “There are probably some songs that you would generally try to avoid in the world climate,” he confirms. “There are things that my dad didn’t even play that much onstage, so it’s not like there are people clamouring to hear some of those songs. I’d rather focus on the stuff that showcases him as a composer or a guitarist and bandleader than something that could have potentially some shock value with the lyrics.”
Dweezil’s live shows have been known to run for more than two hours, so Hot Rats won’t fill the whole concert on the upcoming tour, allowing the band to explore deeper and further into the Zappa catalogue. And, true to the spirit of Frank, no two nights will ever be the same.
“That’s the genius of the arrangements,” says Dweezil. “My dad created compositions that could be played night after night but they are going to be different every time because of the improvisational sections. That’s why he was so heavily bootlegged. You can hear a song like Inca Roads, and every time you hear it, it’s going to be different because the solo section will change, and it will be a whole different performance.”
As his father was justly famous for doing, Dweezil wants to give each audience a singular, one-off experience that will never be replicated or repeated. “It’s magical in the sense that you’re hearing something that is unique in that moment in time and it will never be played exactly that way again,” he says, “which is different than modern concert production where everything is done to a grid, things are being flown in off tape or computer, and the lighting cues are all set to go with the same thing that’s happening with the click track that the musicians are playing to and there is no improvisation.”
All those years spent studying his father’s music and Frank’s approach to creativity live in the moment all pay off in those two to three hours onstage. “When you’re a musician who has spent a lot of time to develop a vocabulary and a technical level of skill where in the same way that you would have a good and interesting conversation with somebody, that’s the kind of feeling that the music is creating onstage,” says Dweezil. “When you’re playing with musicians and ideas are going back and forth and you’re really in it and listening, that is the most fun that you can have as a musician. Then you have the challenge of the difficult composed parts that you have to execute and that’s really what makes playing my dad’s music the most fun, but it’s also the hardest thing ever because you have two different disciplines that you have to really be excellent at.”
Travelling the world meeting fans of his father’s music, Dweezil often asks them what record first pulled them into the Zappa universe. Sometimes, it’s one of the better-known, more accessible works like Apostrophe (’) or Over-Nite Sensation, but that’s not always the case.
“Other times somebody will get into the music based on a really strange album that most people wouldn’t even listen to all the way through, like
“Anybody that plays the music is able to play the music without having the licences that the ZFT has tried to make. They’ve tried to create a world where nobody can play the music without a licence and that’s not how the law works.”
Thing-Fish for example,” says Dweezil. “When somebody gets into it based on Thing-Fish and then likes the rest of the catalogue, you can tell that that person is into a whole other kind of level of detail within the music. I have a friend of mine whose favourite record is Burnt Weeny Sandwich. You just wonder, how did this music come to be made? Some stuff seems more apparent where the ideas come from and then some of the arrangements seem a little more obtuse. When I’m learning the music, I’m always fascinated by the huge range, the depth and the variety, because my dad didn’t have a formula, he didn’t repeat himself. That’s the thing that’s always so impressive to me. I think that’s what the fans like too, that there’s so much variety and we try to put that into an entire show.”
The current tour is going out under the name Dweezil Zappa: Hot Rats Live, but the guitarist has faced a long struggle to keep using his family name in his professional life. After his mother Gail died in 2015, control of the Zappa Family Trust (ZFT) passed to Dweezil’s siblings Ahmet and Diva, leading to a lengthy legal dispute over the use of Frank’s name. In response, Dweezil dropped the Zappa Plays Zappa moniker and named his 2016 venture 50 Years Of Frank: Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F@%k He Wants – The Cease And Desist Tour. Happily, things seem to have settled down somewhat.
“It’s now just under my own name, which is totally fine by me,” says Dweezil, “but it seems like a totally unnecessary exercise that was brought on by the ZFT, the whole name change thing. Ultimately, anybody that plays the music is able to play the music without having the licences that the ZFT has tried to make. They’ve tried to create a world where nobody can play the music without a licence and that’s not how the law works. That’s why things get confusing for a lot of people.”
Dweezil says it’s just simpler and clearer to use his own name. “Before, part of the name implied there were two Zappas involved,” he says about Zappa Plays Zappa. “Somehow it gets confusing when it’s just my name because people are not sure whether or not I’m going to be playing stuff other than my dad’s music. It seems strange that you have to overexplain things to people, but that somehow is the world we live in. ‘Okay, I’m going to play Hot Rats,’ and then people will be still saying, ‘But are you going to play any of your dad’s music?’ That’s what happens.”
Dweezil Zappa: Hot Rats Live tours the UK in December. For more information, visit www.dweezilzappa.com.