FZ: What's your name?
Mr Tickman: I'm Martin Tickman
FZ: And what is your position here?
Mr Tickman: Front office manager
FZ: The name of this stablishment is . . . ?
Mr Tickman: This is the Edgewater Inn
FZ: In Seattle, Washington. Can you tell me, uh, how some rock'n'roll groups have taken advantage of this unique situation?
Mr Tickman: They've taken advantage in different ways, and we do encourage, uh, and advertise that you can fish from your room and we are glad to have our guests fish from 'em
FZ: Do you supply them with fishing equipment?
Mr Tickman: No, but we have a shop in the hotel that does rent the equipment as well as bait
FZ: What sort of bait do they usually use?
Mr Tickman: Uh, it's a preserved minnow of some variety, I don't know exactly what the fish is
FZ: Well, what do they do after they fish from the window?
Mr Tickman: Well, rock'n'roll bands and other guests as well often catch shark and squid and octopus and usually we, it lands up either in the bath tub or dribbled on the floor on the way to the bath tub
FZ: Mm-mmh . . .
Mr Tickman: But it's not reserved to, uh, to any rock'n'roll bands, I mean, other guests do it too
FZ: Mm-mmh, but how frequently do you find squids and sharks and octopuses in the bath tubs of the rooms here at the hotel?
Mr Tickman: After almost any good weekend of pretty heavy occupancy, say like over half the house filled
FZ: If you have over the . . .
Mr Tickman: Way, way . . .
FZ: . . . over half house filled you'd find one, say?
Mr Tickman: Yeah, say, one or something like that
FZ: So how often would you say that is each week? Twice a week you'd find a . . . ?
Mr Tickman: Well, I would, I don't know that I would say that it would average to anything like that, you may find on four or five rooms with fish from various places, you know, around. But there's not much you can do with the shark after you've caught him, you know, some of these things are pretty big
FZ: What would you imagine is done with these, uh, sharks after they've been caught before they are left, uh, for you to be cleaned up?
Mr Tickman: Sometimes the guest calls the houseman or housekeeper to haul it away because there's nothing that they can do with it
FZ: Yeah, well. Have you ever heard of any other things that were done with them before they were hauled away?
Mr Tickman: Yes, a lot of, some people like to, uh, perform vivisection on 'em, or something like that. Occasionally you find that little bit of mess . . .
FZ: Yeah
Mr Tickman: I'll say that the, the, the "blood on the carpet" syndrome is rather, eh, rather rare, but it did occasionally happen
FZ: Do you ever find fish blood on the sheets of your beds here?
Mr Tickman: Not identifiable as such, no . . .
FZ: I see. Do you know of any stories about, uh, bizarre sexual activities performed with squid, octopus and mud sharks here in your rooms?
Mr Tickman: No . . . I should think a mud shark would be a little uncomfortable, since their skin is so sandy but, uh, never heard of anyone having it with an octopus
Showing posts with label Frank Zappa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frank Zappa. Show all posts
November 07, 2010
November 02, 2010
"On Junk Food for the Soul" Frank Zappa's article from New Perspective's Quarterly on America's cultural decay - 1987
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were one of the strongest influences on early rock n' roll. In recent years, Zappa has publicly defended rock from cultural conservatives like Tipper Gore and her group, the Parents' Music Resource Center, which seeks greater parental control over what they consider the inordinate influence of sex and violence in rock music.
We asked Frank Zappa to respond to selected passages from The Closing of the American Mind, in which Allan Bloom laments "Parents' loss of control over
their children's moral education,' and provocatively labels rock music "junk food for the soul."
THE NATURE OF MUSIC
"Music is the soul's primitive and primary speech... without articulate speech or reason. It is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason...Civilization... is the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions... Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire- not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." -- A. Bloom
This is a puff pastry version of the belief that music is the work of the Devil: that the nasty ol' Devil plays his fiddle and people dance around and we don't want to see them twitching like that. In fact, if one wants to be a real artist in the United States today and comment on our culture, one would be very far off the track if one did something delicate or sublime. This is not a noble, delicate, sublime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers who are doing the crude, vulgar, repulsive things Bloom doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact.
In general, anti-rock propositions began when rock n' roll began, and most of these were racially motivated. In the 50s, petitions were circulated which said, "Don't allow your children to buy Negro records." The petitions referred to the "raw unbridled passion" of screaming people with dark skin who were going to drive our children wild. Some things never go out of fashion in certain ideological camps. They are like tenets of the faith.
Music's real effect on people is a new field of science called psychoacoustics- the way and organism deals with wiggling air molecules. Our ears decode the wiggling air molecules, and that gives us the information of a particular musical sound. Our brain says, "This is music, this is a structure," and we deal with it based on certain tools we have acquired.
I personally make music because I want to ask a question, and I want to get an answer. If that question and answer amuse me, then statistically, there are a certain number of other people out there who have the same amusement factor. If I present my work to them, they will be amused by it, and we will all have a good time.
I need to be amused because I get bored easily and being amused entertains me. If I could be easily amused, like many people who like beer and football, I would never do anything because everything that would be beautiful for my life would already be provided by American television.
But bear and television bore me, so what am I going to do? I am going to be alive for X number of years. I have to do something with my time besides sleep and eat. So, I devise little things to amuse myself. If I can amuse somebody else, great. And if I can amuse somebody else and earn a living while doing it, that is a true miracle in the 20th Century!
MUSIC AND THE DARK FORCES OF THE SOUL
"To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul- to make them serve a higher purpose, and ideal, to give man's duties a fullness. --A. Bloom
This is a man who has fallen for rock's fabricated image of itself. This is the worst kind of ivory tower intellectualism. Anybody who talks about dark forces is right on the fringe of mumbo jumbo. Dark forces? What is this, another product from Lucasfilm? The passions! When was the last time you saw an American exhibit any form of passion other than the desire to shoot a guy on the freeway? Those are the forces of evil as far as I'm concerned.
If there are dark forces hovering in the vicinity of the music business, they are mercantile forces. We meet the darkness when we meet the orchestra committees, when we get in touch with funding organizations, when we deal with people who give grants and when we get into the world of commerce that greets us when we arrive with our piece of art. Whether it's a rock n' roll record or a symphony, it's the same machinery lurking out there.
The reason a person writes a piece of music has got nothing to do with dark forces. I certainly don't have dark forces lurking around me when I'm writing. If someone is going to write a piece of music, in fact they are preoccupied with the boring labor and very hard work involved. That's what's really going on.
WHAT MAKES MUSIC CLASSICAL
"Rock music... has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions... Cultivation of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. Bach's religious intentions and Beethoven's revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples." --A. Bloom
This is such nonsense. All the people recognized as great classical composers are recognized at this point for two reasons:
One, during the time these composers were alive and writing they had patrons who liked what they did and who therefore paid them money or gave them a place to live so that the composers could stay alive by writing dots on pieces of paper. If any of the compositions these men wrote had not been pleasing to a church, a duke, or a king, they would have been out of work and their music would not have survived.
There is a book called Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with thousands of names in it. You have never heard of most of the people in that book, nor have you heard their music. That doesn't mean they wrote awful music, it means they didn't have hits.
So basically, the people who are recognized as the geniuses of classical music had hits. And the person who determined whether or not it was a hit was a king, a duke, or the church or whoever paid the bill. The desire to get a sandwich or something to drink had a lot to do with it. And the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill.
Today, we have a similar situation in rock n' roll. We have kings, dukes, and popes: the A&R guy who spots a group or screens the tape when it comes in; the business affairs guy who writes the contract; the radio station programmers who choose what records get air play.
The other reason the classical greats survived is their works are played over and over again by orchestras. The reasons they are played over and over again are: 1) all the musicians in the orchestra know how to play them because they learned them in the conservatory; 2) the orchestra management programs these pieces because the musicians already know them and therefore it costs less to rehearse them; 3) the composers are dead so the orchestras pay no royalties for the use of the music.
Today, survivability is based on the number of specimens in the market place- the sheer numbers of plastic objects. Many other compositions from this era will vanish, but Michael Jackson's Thriller album will survive because there are 30 million odd pieces of plastic out there. No matter what we may think of the content, a future generation may pick up that piece of plastic and say, "Oh, they were like this."
I suppose somewhere in the future there will be other men like Bloom certifying that the very narrow spectrum of rock n' roll which survives composes the great works of the later half of the 20th Century.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLASSICAL MUSIC AND ROCK MUSIC
"Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied... These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love... Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux." -- A. Bloom
Again, Bloom is not looking at what is really going on here. The ugliness in this society is not a product of unrefined art, but of unrefined commerce, wild superstition and religious fanaticism.
The real difference between the classics and rock n' roll is mostly a matter of form. In order to say we have written a symphony, the design we put on a piece of paper has to conform to certain specifications. We have an exposition that lasts a certain amount of time, then modulation, development and recapitulation. It's like a box, like an egg carton. We must fill all the little spaces in the egg carton with the right forms. If we do, we can call it a symphony because it conforms to the spaces in that box.
Compare that creative process to rock n' roll. If we want to have an AM hit record, we have another egg carton to fill. We have an intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, another verse, and then a fade out. All of which requires a "hook." That's a very rigid form. If we wander away from that form, our song's not going to go on the radio because it doesn't sound like it fits in their format.
Now, whether the person writing the song graduated from a conservatory or whether they came out of a garage, they know that in order to finish a piece they have to do certain things to make it fit into a certain form. In the classical period the sonata or a concerto or symphony had to be that certain size and shape or else the king was not going to like it. One could die. These were literally matters of life and death, but not in the way Bloom defines them.
THE ROCK BUSINESS
"The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music... The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance of strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob's emergent wishes- our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates' rhetorical adversary- and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock." -- A. Bloom
There is some truth to that, but how did we get to this point and what do we do about it?
We got here because teenagers are the most sought after consumers. The whole idea of merchandising the pre-pubescent masturbational fantasy is not necessarily the work of the songwriter or the singer, but the work of the merchandiser who has elevated rock n' roll to the commercial enterprise it is.
In the beginning, rock n' roll was young kids singing to other kids about their girlfriends. That's all there was. The guys who made those records came from Manual Arts High School. They went into a recording studio, were given some wine, $25 and a bunch of records when their song came out as a single- which made them heroes at school. That was their career, not, "Well, we're not going to sing until we get a $125 thousand advance."
Today, rock n' roll is about getting a contract with a major company, and pretty much doing what the company tells you to do. The company promotes the image of rock n' roll as being wild and fun when in fact it's just a dismal business.
Record companies have people who claim to be experts on what the public really wants to hear. And they inflict their taste on the people who actually make the music. To be a big success, you need a really big company behind you because really big companies can make really big distribution deals.
Even people who are waiting to go into the business know it's a business. They spend a great deal of time planning what they will look like and getting a good publicity photo before they walk in the door with their tape. And the record companies tend to take the attitude that it doesn't make too much difference what the tape sounds like as long as the artists look right, because they can always hire a producer who will fix up the sound and make it the way they want it- so long as the people wear the right clothes and have the right hair.
RETAINING CLASSICAL MUSIC
"Classical music is dead among the young... Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breath, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music... Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand." -- A. Bloom
On this point, Bloom and I can agree, but how can a child be blamed for consuming only that which is presented to him? Most kids have never been in contact with anything other than this highly merchandised stuff.
When I testified in front of the Senate, I pointed out that if they don't like the idea of young people buying certain kinds of music, why don't they stick a few dollars back into the school system to have music appreciation? There are kids today who have never heard a string quartet; they have never heard a symphony orchestra. I argued that the money for music appreciation courses, in terms of social good and other benefits such as improved behavior or uplifting the spirit, is far less than the cost of another set of uniforms for the football team. But I frankly don't see people waving banners in the streets saying more music appreciation in the schools.
When I was in school, we could go into a room and they had records there. I could hear anything I wanted by going in there and putting on a record. I won't say I enjoyed everything that was played for me, but I was curious, and if I had never heard any of that music I wouldn't know about it.
Once we're out of school, the time we can spend doing that type of research is limited because most of us are out looking for a job flipping hamburgers in the great tradition of the Reagan economic miracle. When all is said and done, that's the real source of America's barren and arid lives.
Chris Ekman sez: "This article was commissioned from the New Perspectives Quarterly as part of an issue on America's Cultural Decay. (You may have seen a bit of it quoted in Watson's book.) I think it would make a good companion with the Life Magazine "New Rock" manifesto. It dates from 1987. "
All about Frank Zappa
Fred Händl
Daily Polaroids Website
We asked Frank Zappa to respond to selected passages from The Closing of the American Mind, in which Allan Bloom laments "Parents' loss of control over
their children's moral education,' and provocatively labels rock music "junk food for the soul."
THE NATURE OF MUSIC
"Music is the soul's primitive and primary speech... without articulate speech or reason. It is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason...Civilization... is the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions... Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire- not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." -- A. Bloom
This is a puff pastry version of the belief that music is the work of the Devil: that the nasty ol' Devil plays his fiddle and people dance around and we don't want to see them twitching like that. In fact, if one wants to be a real artist in the United States today and comment on our culture, one would be very far off the track if one did something delicate or sublime. This is not a noble, delicate, sublime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers who are doing the crude, vulgar, repulsive things Bloom doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact.
In general, anti-rock propositions began when rock n' roll began, and most of these were racially motivated. In the 50s, petitions were circulated which said, "Don't allow your children to buy Negro records." The petitions referred to the "raw unbridled passion" of screaming people with dark skin who were going to drive our children wild. Some things never go out of fashion in certain ideological camps. They are like tenets of the faith.
Music's real effect on people is a new field of science called psychoacoustics- the way and organism deals with wiggling air molecules. Our ears decode the wiggling air molecules, and that gives us the information of a particular musical sound. Our brain says, "This is music, this is a structure," and we deal with it based on certain tools we have acquired.
I personally make music because I want to ask a question, and I want to get an answer. If that question and answer amuse me, then statistically, there are a certain number of other people out there who have the same amusement factor. If I present my work to them, they will be amused by it, and we will all have a good time.
I need to be amused because I get bored easily and being amused entertains me. If I could be easily amused, like many people who like beer and football, I would never do anything because everything that would be beautiful for my life would already be provided by American television.
But bear and television bore me, so what am I going to do? I am going to be alive for X number of years. I have to do something with my time besides sleep and eat. So, I devise little things to amuse myself. If I can amuse somebody else, great. And if I can amuse somebody else and earn a living while doing it, that is a true miracle in the 20th Century!
MUSIC AND THE DARK FORCES OF THE SOUL
"To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul- to make them serve a higher purpose, and ideal, to give man's duties a fullness. --A. Bloom
This is a man who has fallen for rock's fabricated image of itself. This is the worst kind of ivory tower intellectualism. Anybody who talks about dark forces is right on the fringe of mumbo jumbo. Dark forces? What is this, another product from Lucasfilm? The passions! When was the last time you saw an American exhibit any form of passion other than the desire to shoot a guy on the freeway? Those are the forces of evil as far as I'm concerned.
If there are dark forces hovering in the vicinity of the music business, they are mercantile forces. We meet the darkness when we meet the orchestra committees, when we get in touch with funding organizations, when we deal with people who give grants and when we get into the world of commerce that greets us when we arrive with our piece of art. Whether it's a rock n' roll record or a symphony, it's the same machinery lurking out there.
The reason a person writes a piece of music has got nothing to do with dark forces. I certainly don't have dark forces lurking around me when I'm writing. If someone is going to write a piece of music, in fact they are preoccupied with the boring labor and very hard work involved. That's what's really going on.
WHAT MAKES MUSIC CLASSICAL
"Rock music... has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions... Cultivation of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. Bach's religious intentions and Beethoven's revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples." --A. Bloom
This is such nonsense. All the people recognized as great classical composers are recognized at this point for two reasons:
One, during the time these composers were alive and writing they had patrons who liked what they did and who therefore paid them money or gave them a place to live so that the composers could stay alive by writing dots on pieces of paper. If any of the compositions these men wrote had not been pleasing to a church, a duke, or a king, they would have been out of work and their music would not have survived.
There is a book called Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with thousands of names in it. You have never heard of most of the people in that book, nor have you heard their music. That doesn't mean they wrote awful music, it means they didn't have hits.
So basically, the people who are recognized as the geniuses of classical music had hits. And the person who determined whether or not it was a hit was a king, a duke, or the church or whoever paid the bill. The desire to get a sandwich or something to drink had a lot to do with it. And the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill.
Today, we have a similar situation in rock n' roll. We have kings, dukes, and popes: the A&R guy who spots a group or screens the tape when it comes in; the business affairs guy who writes the contract; the radio station programmers who choose what records get air play.
The other reason the classical greats survived is their works are played over and over again by orchestras. The reasons they are played over and over again are: 1) all the musicians in the orchestra know how to play them because they learned them in the conservatory; 2) the orchestra management programs these pieces because the musicians already know them and therefore it costs less to rehearse them; 3) the composers are dead so the orchestras pay no royalties for the use of the music.
Today, survivability is based on the number of specimens in the market place- the sheer numbers of plastic objects. Many other compositions from this era will vanish, but Michael Jackson's Thriller album will survive because there are 30 million odd pieces of plastic out there. No matter what we may think of the content, a future generation may pick up that piece of plastic and say, "Oh, they were like this."
I suppose somewhere in the future there will be other men like Bloom certifying that the very narrow spectrum of rock n' roll which survives composes the great works of the later half of the 20th Century.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLASSICAL MUSIC AND ROCK MUSIC
"Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied... These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love... Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux." -- A. Bloom
Again, Bloom is not looking at what is really going on here. The ugliness in this society is not a product of unrefined art, but of unrefined commerce, wild superstition and religious fanaticism.
The real difference between the classics and rock n' roll is mostly a matter of form. In order to say we have written a symphony, the design we put on a piece of paper has to conform to certain specifications. We have an exposition that lasts a certain amount of time, then modulation, development and recapitulation. It's like a box, like an egg carton. We must fill all the little spaces in the egg carton with the right forms. If we do, we can call it a symphony because it conforms to the spaces in that box.
Compare that creative process to rock n' roll. If we want to have an AM hit record, we have another egg carton to fill. We have an intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, another verse, and then a fade out. All of which requires a "hook." That's a very rigid form. If we wander away from that form, our song's not going to go on the radio because it doesn't sound like it fits in their format.
Now, whether the person writing the song graduated from a conservatory or whether they came out of a garage, they know that in order to finish a piece they have to do certain things to make it fit into a certain form. In the classical period the sonata or a concerto or symphony had to be that certain size and shape or else the king was not going to like it. One could die. These were literally matters of life and death, but not in the way Bloom defines them.
THE ROCK BUSINESS
"The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music... The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance of strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob's emergent wishes- our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates' rhetorical adversary- and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock." -- A. Bloom
There is some truth to that, but how did we get to this point and what do we do about it?
We got here because teenagers are the most sought after consumers. The whole idea of merchandising the pre-pubescent masturbational fantasy is not necessarily the work of the songwriter or the singer, but the work of the merchandiser who has elevated rock n' roll to the commercial enterprise it is.
In the beginning, rock n' roll was young kids singing to other kids about their girlfriends. That's all there was. The guys who made those records came from Manual Arts High School. They went into a recording studio, were given some wine, $25 and a bunch of records when their song came out as a single- which made them heroes at school. That was their career, not, "Well, we're not going to sing until we get a $125 thousand advance."
Today, rock n' roll is about getting a contract with a major company, and pretty much doing what the company tells you to do. The company promotes the image of rock n' roll as being wild and fun when in fact it's just a dismal business.
Record companies have people who claim to be experts on what the public really wants to hear. And they inflict their taste on the people who actually make the music. To be a big success, you need a really big company behind you because really big companies can make really big distribution deals.
Even people who are waiting to go into the business know it's a business. They spend a great deal of time planning what they will look like and getting a good publicity photo before they walk in the door with their tape. And the record companies tend to take the attitude that it doesn't make too much difference what the tape sounds like as long as the artists look right, because they can always hire a producer who will fix up the sound and make it the way they want it- so long as the people wear the right clothes and have the right hair.
RETAINING CLASSICAL MUSIC
"Classical music is dead among the young... Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breath, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music... Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand." -- A. Bloom
On this point, Bloom and I can agree, but how can a child be blamed for consuming only that which is presented to him? Most kids have never been in contact with anything other than this highly merchandised stuff.
When I testified in front of the Senate, I pointed out that if they don't like the idea of young people buying certain kinds of music, why don't they stick a few dollars back into the school system to have music appreciation? There are kids today who have never heard a string quartet; they have never heard a symphony orchestra. I argued that the money for music appreciation courses, in terms of social good and other benefits such as improved behavior or uplifting the spirit, is far less than the cost of another set of uniforms for the football team. But I frankly don't see people waving banners in the streets saying more music appreciation in the schools.
When I was in school, we could go into a room and they had records there. I could hear anything I wanted by going in there and putting on a record. I won't say I enjoyed everything that was played for me, but I was curious, and if I had never heard any of that music I wouldn't know about it.
Once we're out of school, the time we can spend doing that type of research is limited because most of us are out looking for a job flipping hamburgers in the great tradition of the Reagan economic miracle. When all is said and done, that's the real source of America's barren and arid lives.
Chris Ekman sez: "This article was commissioned from the New Perspectives Quarterly as part of an issue on America's Cultural Decay. (You may have seen a bit of it quoted in Watson's book.) I think it would make a good companion with the Life Magazine "New Rock" manifesto. It dates from 1987. "
All about Frank Zappa
Fred Händl
Daily Polaroids Website
"On Junk Food for the Soul" Frank Zappa's article from New Perspective's Quarterly on America's cultural decay - 1987
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were one of the strongest influences on early rock n' roll. In recent years, Zappa has publicly defended rock from cultural conservatives like Tipper Gore and her group, the Parents' Music Resource Center, which seeks greater parental control over what they consider the inordinate influence of sex and violence in rock music.
We asked Frank Zappa to respond to selected passages from The Closing of the American Mind, in which Allan Bloom laments "Parents' loss of control over
their children's moral education,' and provocatively labels rock music "junk food for the soul."
THE NATURE OF MUSIC
"Music is the soul's primitive and primary speech... without articulate speech or reason. It is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason...Civilization... is the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions... Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire- not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." -- A. Bloom
This is a puff pastry version of the belief that music is the work of the Devil: that the nasty ol' Devil plays his fiddle and people dance around and we don't want to see them twitching like that. In fact, if one wants to be a real artist in the United States today and comment on our culture, one would be very far off the track if one did something delicate or sublime. This is not a noble, delicate, sublime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers who are doing the crude, vulgar, repulsive things Bloom doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact.
In general, anti-rock propositions began when rock n' roll began, and most of these were racially motivated. In the 50s, petitions were circulated which said, "Don't allow your children to buy Negro records." The petitions referred to the "raw unbridled passion" of screaming people with dark skin who were going to drive our children wild. Some things never go out of fashion in certain ideological camps. They are like tenets of the faith.
Music's real effect on people is a new field of science called psychoacoustics- the way and organism deals with wiggling air molecules. Our ears decode the wiggling air molecules, and that gives us the information of a particular musical sound. Our brain says, "This is music, this is a structure," and we deal with it based on certain tools we have acquired.
I personally make music because I want to ask a question, and I want to get an answer. If that question and answer amuse me, then statistically, there are a certain number of other people out there who have the same amusement factor. If I present my work to them, they will be amused by it, and we will all have a good time.
I need to be amused because I get bored easily and being amused entertains me. If I could be easily amused, like many people who like beer and football, I would never do anything because everything that would be beautiful for my life would already be provided by American television.
But bear and television bore me, so what am I going to do? I am going to be alive for X number of years. I have to do something with my time besides sleep and eat. So, I devise little things to amuse myself. If I can amuse somebody else, great. And if I can amuse somebody else and earn a living while doing it, that is a true miracle in the 20th Century!
MUSIC AND THE DARK FORCES OF THE SOUL
"To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul- to make them serve a higher purpose, and ideal, to give man's duties a fullness. --A. Bloom
This is a man who has fallen for rock's fabricated image of itself. This is the worst kind of ivory tower intellectualism. Anybody who talks about dark forces is right on the fringe of mumbo jumbo. Dark forces? What is this, another product from Lucasfilm? The passions! When was the last time you saw an American exhibit any form of passion other than the desire to shoot a guy on the freeway? Those are the forces of evil as far as I'm concerned.
If there are dark forces hovering in the vicinity of the music business, they are mercantile forces. We meet the darkness when we meet the orchestra committees, when we get in touch with funding organizations, when we deal with people who give grants and when we get into the world of commerce that greets us when we arrive with our piece of art. Whether it's a rock n' roll record or a symphony, it's the same machinery lurking out there.
The reason a person writes a piece of music has got nothing to do with dark forces. I certainly don't have dark forces lurking around me when I'm writing. If someone is going to write a piece of music, in fact they are preoccupied with the boring labor and very hard work involved. That's what's really going on.
WHAT MAKES MUSIC CLASSICAL
"Rock music... has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions... Cultivation of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. Bach's religious intentions and Beethoven's revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples." --A. Bloom
This is such nonsense. All the people recognized as great classical composers are recognized at this point for two reasons:
One, during the time these composers were alive and writing they had patrons who liked what they did and who therefore paid them money or gave them a place to live so that the composers could stay alive by writing dots on pieces of paper. If any of the compositions these men wrote had not been pleasing to a church, a duke, or a king, they would have been out of work and their music would not have survived.
There is a book called Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with thousands of names in it. You have never heard of most of the people in that book, nor have you heard their music. That doesn't mean they wrote awful music, it means they didn't have hits.
So basically, the people who are recognized as the geniuses of classical music had hits. And the person who determined whether or not it was a hit was a king, a duke, or the church or whoever paid the bill. The desire to get a sandwich or something to drink had a lot to do with it. And the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill.
Today, we have a similar situation in rock n' roll. We have kings, dukes, and popes: the A&R guy who spots a group or screens the tape when it comes in; the business affairs guy who writes the contract; the radio station programmers who choose what records get air play.
The other reason the classical greats survived is their works are played over and over again by orchestras. The reasons they are played over and over again are: 1) all the musicians in the orchestra know how to play them because they learned them in the conservatory; 2) the orchestra management programs these pieces because the musicians already know them and therefore it costs less to rehearse them; 3) the composers are dead so the orchestras pay no royalties for the use of the music.
Today, survivability is based on the number of specimens in the market place- the sheer numbers of plastic objects. Many other compositions from this era will vanish, but Michael Jackson's Thriller album will survive because there are 30 million odd pieces of plastic out there. No matter what we may think of the content, a future generation may pick up that piece of plastic and say, "Oh, they were like this."
I suppose somewhere in the future there will be other men like Bloom certifying that the very narrow spectrum of rock n' roll which survives composes the great works of the later half of the 20th Century.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLASSICAL MUSIC AND ROCK MUSIC
"Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied... These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love... Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux." -- A. Bloom
Again, Bloom is not looking at what is really going on here. The ugliness in this society is not a product of unrefined art, but of unrefined commerce, wild superstition and religious fanaticism.
The real difference between the classics and rock n' roll is mostly a matter of form. In order to say we have written a symphony, the design we put on a piece of paper has to conform to certain specifications. We have an exposition that lasts a certain amount of time, then modulation, development and recapitulation. It's like a box, like an egg carton. We must fill all the little spaces in the egg carton with the right forms. If we do, we can call it a symphony because it conforms to the spaces in that box.
Compare that creative process to rock n' roll. If we want to have an AM hit record, we have another egg carton to fill. We have an intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, another verse, and then a fade out. All of which requires a "hook." That's a very rigid form. If we wander away from that form, our song's not going to go on the radio because it doesn't sound like it fits in their format.
Now, whether the person writing the song graduated from a conservatory or whether they came out of a garage, they know that in order to finish a piece they have to do certain things to make it fit into a certain form. In the classical period the sonata or a concerto or symphony had to be that certain size and shape or else the king was not going to like it. One could die. These were literally matters of life and death, but not in the way Bloom defines them.
THE ROCK BUSINESS
"The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music... The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance of strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob's emergent wishes- our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates' rhetorical adversary- and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock." -- A. Bloom
There is some truth to that, but how did we get to this point and what do we do about it?
We got here because teenagers are the most sought after consumers. The whole idea of merchandising the pre-pubescent masturbational fantasy is not necessarily the work of the songwriter or the singer, but the work of the merchandiser who has elevated rock n' roll to the commercial enterprise it is.
In the beginning, rock n' roll was young kids singing to other kids about their girlfriends. That's all there was. The guys who made those records came from Manual Arts High School. They went into a recording studio, were given some wine, $25 and a bunch of records when their song came out as a single- which made them heroes at school. That was their career, not, "Well, we're not going to sing until we get a $125 thousand advance."
Today, rock n' roll is about getting a contract with a major company, and pretty much doing what the company tells you to do. The company promotes the image of rock n' roll as being wild and fun when in fact it's just a dismal business.
Record companies have people who claim to be experts on what the public really wants to hear. And they inflict their taste on the people who actually make the music. To be a big success, you need a really big company behind you because really big companies can make really big distribution deals.
Even people who are waiting to go into the business know it's a business. They spend a great deal of time planning what they will look like and getting a good publicity photo before they walk in the door with their tape. And the record companies tend to take the attitude that it doesn't make too much difference what the tape sounds like as long as the artists look right, because they can always hire a producer who will fix up the sound and make it the way they want it- so long as the people wear the right clothes and have the right hair.
RETAINING CLASSICAL MUSIC
"Classical music is dead among the young... Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breath, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music... Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand." -- A. Bloom
On this point, Bloom and I can agree, but how can a child be blamed for consuming only that which is presented to him? Most kids have never been in contact with anything other than this highly merchandised stuff.
When I testified in front of the Senate, I pointed out that if they don't like the idea of young people buying certain kinds of music, why don't they stick a few dollars back into the school system to have music appreciation? There are kids today who have never heard a string quartet; they have never heard a symphony orchestra. I argued that the money for music appreciation courses, in terms of social good and other benefits such as improved behavior or uplifting the spirit, is far less than the cost of another set of uniforms for the football team. But I frankly don't see people waving banners in the streets saying more music appreciation in the schools.
When I was in school, we could go into a room and they had records there. I could hear anything I wanted by going in there and putting on a record. I won't say I enjoyed everything that was played for me, but I was curious, and if I had never heard any of that music I wouldn't know about it.
Once we're out of school, the time we can spend doing that type of research is limited because most of us are out looking for a job flipping hamburgers in the great tradition of the Reagan economic miracle. When all is said and done, that's the real source of America's barren and arid lives.
Chris Ekman sez: "This article was commissioned from the New Perspectives Quarterly as part of an issue on America's Cultural Decay. (You may have seen a bit of it quoted in Watson's book.) I think it would make a good companion with the Life Magazine "New Rock" manifesto. It dates from 1987. "
All about Frank Zappa
Fred Händl
Daily Polaroids Website
September 05, 2010
A Zappa Affair in Berkeley - Great images of the program handout and flyer!
First, before the images, a great big THANKS to http://www.afka.net/Scrapbook/aza.htm - where I found them. Look here. Isn't that just great!?
Unfortunately, The Performance seems to have left irreparable scars on the souls involved at the time (read:
http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/The_Zappa_Affair,_87-03) it's a wonderful piece of music. The bootleg recording is pretty easy to find. And, well, I suggest you DO find it for it will enrich your knowledge of Zappa, modern classical music and, well .. it'll also make you feel good about yourself. Like when you're reading a nice book. Like Candide, by Voltaire, for example. Trust me, you'll love it!
I'm not here to promote piracy when it comes to music, but since this has never been officially released, I guess it doesn't hurt anyone .. especially because it's a wonderful recording from a fantastic performance!
Googling: A Zappa Affair - Berkelely - torrent will help a lot :-)
LNX:
http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/docs/A_Zappa_Affair.html
http://www.afka.net/Scrapbook/aza.htm
And here's the images!
© Fred Händl - 2010
August 28, 2010
Frank Zappa Interview: Guitar World Magazine, March 1982 - Les Paul Mods Search making progress
In my search of Frank Zappa's Les Paul customizations, I found following information today. Progress!
- Fred
NOTE: This guitar is modified to approximate the Les Paul Frank Zappa used during the late 1970s and early 1980s, on such albums as "Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar". it is pictured on the cover of that album, and also, in its exact configuration I've modeled, on the cover of Guitar World (March 1982).
Note: Image and article text © 1982 Guitar World Magazine.
This is the magazine that features Frank Zappa playing his cherry sunburst Les Paul, and the article contains a description, by Frank, of the mods he made. I went by this description when modifying my Greco LP, above.
The Description
From page 37:
Guitar World: What kind of modifications did you build into the Les Paul?
Frank Zappa: The Les Paul has a pre-amp and it has two different kinds of pickups, and it has a Dan Armstrong pickup in the neck position and it has a Carvin pickup in the bridge position. It has a Dan Armstrong gizmo called The Green Ringer built into it, which I can dial in. It also has an EQ circuit which in one position gives you about an 8db boost at 8-K and the other position gives you an 8db boost at 500 cycles, so you can either go from a bright sound to a more mid-rangery wah-wah kind of sound, all built into the guitar. And then it has a pickup selector switch that has nine positions. It changes the wiring between the pickups in a lot of differtent ways, so it's got a lot of tonal variation. I can make it sound just like a Telecaster if I want. Unfortunately, in that position it's not humbucking and under the lights it makes a lot of noise but in the studio it's usually okay. And then there's a little toggle switch on it that goes from series to parallel on the pickups and depending on where the pickup selector switch is set that gives you yet another whole series of variations. And so, I have eighteen time three different tone selections on that guitar.
Chuck's Mods: I couldn't replicate everything Frank did to his guitar, so I first concentrated on some cosmetics. You can see from other pictures of his guitar that he had either Ibanez or Gotoh pearloid velvetune tuners, so I added those (mine are Ibanez). I installed a brass nut too, since other pictures show one. I made sure I also had the same style control knobs. For the pickups, I'm not sure if the article was correct about "Dan Armstrong" pickups, but I found a great "Kent Armstrong" pickup to use in the neck position. I used a Carvin Super Distortion (SD) for the bridge. Both pickups are wired with tri-sound switches that give me humbucker, parallel-humbucker, and single-coil modes. I don't have a sustainer/pre-amp in mine, though I might put in a Fernandes Sustainer someday.
August 20, 2010
Frank Zappa in PROGRESSIVE MAGAZINE November 1986
Zappa on Art in America
Lyons / Friedman: In the past you have said that "art is dying in this country." What do you mean by this?
Frank Zappa: Much of the creative work I find interesting and amusing has no basis in economic reality. Most decisions relevant to expenditures for what gets produced and distributed are made strictly on a bottom line basis. Nobody makes a move without talking to their accountant first. There will always be people who will take a chance, but their numbers are dwindling. Those who are crazy enough to take the chance on spending money to make some unusual object or event take place are an endangered species. The spirit of adventurousness at any level of American society has been pretty much legislated away. In the eighties, with a repressive Republican, yuppie-oriented administration installed and ready to perpetuate itself with Supreme Court appointments that will keep us in trouble for the next half century, the prognosis is not good for things which differ from the viewpoint of the conservative right.
Lyons / Friedman: Do you think anything can be done to reverse the trend?
Frank Zappa: Perhaps. I tend to view the whole thing as a conspiracy. It is no accident that the public schools in the United States are pure shit. It is no accident that masses of drugs are available and openly used at all levels of society. In a way, the real business of government is the business of controlling the labor force. Social pressure is placed on people to become a certain type of individual, and then rewards are heaped on people who conform to that stereotype. Take the pop music business, for example. Look at the stereotypes held up by the media as great accomplishment. You see guys who are making millions of dollars and selling millions of units. And because they are making and selling millions they are stamped with the seal of approval, and it is the millions which make their work quality. Yet anyone can look at what is being done and say, "Jesus, I can do that!" You celebrate mediocrity, you get mediocrity. People who could have achieved more won't, because they know that all they have to do is be "that" and they too can sell millions and make millions and have people love them because they're merely mediocre. Few people who do anything excellent are ever heard of. You know why? Because excellence, pure excellence, terrifies the fuck out of Americans because they have been bred to appreciate the success of the mediocre. People don't like to be reminded that lurking somewhere there are people who can do some shit that you can't do. They can think a way you can't think, they can dance a way you can't dance. They are excellent. You aren't excellent. Most Americans aren't excellent, they're only OK. And so to keep them happy as a labor force, you say, "OK, let's take this mediocre chump," and we say, "He is terrific!" All the other mediocre chumps say, "Yeah, that's right and that gives me hope, because one day as mediocre and chumpish as I am I can..." It's smart labor relations. An MBA decision. That is the orientation of most entertainment, politics, and religion. So considering how firmly entrenched all that is right now, you think it's going to turn around? Not without a genetic mutation it's not!
Lyons / Friedman: If you would focus on the message of pop music for a moment, what do you see as the issues of the 1980's that music can address today?
Frank Zappa: It can address anything it wants to, but it will only address those topics that will sell. Musicians will not address topics that are controversial if they want to have a hit. So music will continue to address those things that really matter to people who buy records: boy-girl relationships, boy-boy relationships, boy-car relationships, girl-car relationships, boy-girl-food relationships, perhaps. But safe. Every once in a while somebody will say "War is Hell" or "Save the Whales" or something bland. But if you talk about pop music as a medium for expressing social attitudes, the medium expresses the social attitude perfectly by avoiding contact with things that are really there. That is the telling point about the society that is consuming the product. If society wanted to hear information of a specific nature in songs, about controversial topics, they would buy them. But they don't. You are talking about a record- buying audience which is interested in their personal health and well-being, their ability to earn a living, their ability to stay young at all costs forever, and not much else.
Lyons / Friedman: How about the role of music in society outside the pop music industry? For example, Kent Nagano (conductor of the Berkeley symphony) said in a recent interview that "a composer has a job to do within a culture. Which is not to say a composer should write what the public already wants to hear, but rather that the public is employing the composer to lead them, to show them a direction." What do you think of that?
Frank Zappa: I don't think a composer has any function in society at all, especially in an industrial society, unless it is writing music scores, advertising jingles, or stuff that is consumed by industry. I respect Kent, however I think he takes a very optimistic and naive attitude toward what it takes to be a composer. If you walk down the street and ask anybody if a composer is of any use to any society, what kind of answer do you think you would get? I mean, nobody gives a shit. If you decide to become a composer, you seriously run the risk of becoming less than a human being. Who the fuck needs you? A songwriter is different. [in a facetious sing-song voice] You write a nice song, then you're important. Because with a song, now we have a car, now we have love, now we have a this ... but a composer? What the fuck do they do? All the good music's already been written by people with wigs and stuff on.
Lyons / Friedman: So the public doesn't need composers. What about composers? Do they need a public? For example [electronic music composer] Milton Babbit, in an essay titled "Who cares if you listen?" has advocated the virtual exclusion of the general public from modern music concerts. What is your opinion on that ?
Frank Zappa: That's unnecessary, they're already excluded; they don't go! Have you been to a modern music concert? Plenty of room, isn't there? Come on Milton, give yourself a break. I hope you're not going to spend money trying to exclude these people. What are you going to do, have it legislated in Congress, like those assholes who wanted to make it a law that you couldn't put anything backwards on a phonograph record?
Lyons / Friedman: So, given all this, what do you think art will be like 20 years from now?
Frank Zappa: Since I'm not in that business, it's hard for me to really care. [Author's note: Zappa does not think that his work is perceived as art.] I can lament its passing. I don't think anything that a reasonable person would describe as art will be around. Not here. I'm talking about art in terms of valued, beautiful stuff that
is done not because of your ego but just because it is beautiful, just because it is the right thing to do. We will be told what is good and it will be mediocre. There's always a possibility that an anomaly will appear - some weird little twisted thing will happen and there will be somebody who's doing it. But who's going to know?
In the dark ages there was art, but who knew?
Zappa on The Music Industry
Lyons / Friedman: How do unknown groups attract the attention of record companies?
Frank Zappa: Today record companies don't even listen to your tape. They look at you publicity photo. They look at your hair. They look at your zippers. How gay do you look? And if you've got the look then it really doesn't make a fucking bit of difference what's on the tape - they can always hire somebody to fix that. And they don't expect you to be around for 20 years. The business is not interested in developing artists. They want that fast buck because they realize that next week there's going to be another hairdo and another zipper. And they realize that the people are not listening, they're dancing, or they're driving, or something else. The business is more geared to expendability today. That's because merchandising is so tied to "visuals" now.
Lyons / Friedman: How is music selected to be heard on pop radio? Is it determined by the taste of the listener or does the public listen to whatever the industry feeds them?
Frank Zappa: A little of both. Radio is consumed like wallpaper is consumed. You don't concentrate on the radio, you turn it on while you're working, you turn it on while you're driving. It's not like the old days when families sat around and looked at it. So the stations are formatted to provide a certain texture and ambience
that will be consumed by people who view themselves in a certain way. Are you a yuppie? Well, you're going to listen to a certain texture because that reinforces the viewpoint you want to project to other people of who and what you are. It's the same thing as what you leave on your coffee table for people to discover when they come to your apartment. It's not a musical medium, it's an advertising medium. So if you have a nation of people who refuse to face reality about themselves, about the rest of the world, about anything, they want reinforcement for the fantasy that they're living in. And these consulting services that format the station know that. Market research will show that. So obviously you want to deliver to the public things that will reinforce that. A station loses money when somebody turns it off like the air. So as long as your station sounds like the kind of swill that the yuppie needs to consume, you got it.
Lyons / Friedman: Could you give us your view of the process whereby a record becomes a hit?
Zappa on His Music
Lyons / Friedman: As you compose, are you primarily guided by how you want the music to affect a listener's spiritual, emotional, intellectual or physical state, or by the musical structure - melody, harmony, and rhythm?
Frank Zappa: None of the above. It's more like, how did it turn out? Does it work? And if it works you don't even have to know why it works. It either works or it doesn't. Its like drawing a picture. Maybe there are too many fingers on one hand, and a foot is too short over there. Or you could apply it to the design of a building. Did you forget to put in a toilet, or are there enough windows on the second floor?
Lyons / Friedman: Those are examples of pragmatic considerations as opposed to aesthetic considerations.
Frank Zappa: I don't know how to explain it. I just do it. It's not based on any academic regulations. If you take a blank piece of paper and pencil and just start sketching, it doesn't necessarily have to be a house and a tree and a cow. It could just be some kind of scribble, but sometimes those scribbles work and they are the right thing for that blank piece of space and you can enjoy them Or you can say, "That's not a house, that's not a cow, that's not a tree, and so I don't like it; it's just a scribble." It depends on what your viewpoint is.
Lyons / Friedman: Is your view truly as subjective as you are painting it to be? So, if I look at an image and it appeals to me, then all I can say is that it works for me and I can't say any more about it?
Frank Zappa: What else do you have the right to say? If you go beyond that, you become a critic. Who needs those fuckers?
Lyons / Friedman: Other people might say that there's something universal, some sort of consensus on what works and what doesn't.
Frank Zappa: People are free to agree. If you want to join a committee to feel the warmth and reassurance of other people's opinions to reinforce your own, then go for it. I happen to not care for that. It's not something that I aspire to, nor do I want to live my life in accordance with that ideal. In fact, I despise it. But it's okay for other people. There's no reason why I should inflict my point of view on somebody who enjoys being part of a group consensus.
Lyons / Friedman: What are the relative merits of various human pursuits? For example, do you consider jogging or playing ice hockey to be of equal value to say creating art, on some cosmic scale?
Frank Zappa: No.
Lyons / Friedman: Why? What is the scale?
Frank Zappa: What is it that survives from ancient civilizations that characterizes that civilization? What do you find? Not their jogging! The music doesn't survive, but things that are related to art do. The beautiful things that the societies do is what survives. Let's look into the future. Let's look at the remnants of the American society . . .
Lyons / Friedman: Wait a second, ugly things survive too.
Frank Zappa: Yep. That's what will survive the American society!
Lyons / Friedman: You seem to admire the raw emotional energy of some music, yet you have little tolerance for emotional love songs.
Frank Zappa: It's quite a challenge to reach somebody emotionally without using words that have literal connections. To perform expressively on an instrument, I have respect for that. To get to the level of performance where you are no longer thinking about operating a piece of machinery, that is worthy of respect. Writing a song about why somebody left you, that's stupid. The performers and composers don't necessarily believe in what they're saying or what they are doing, but they know that if you write a song about love, it's got a 3,000 per cent better chance of going on the radio than if you write a song about celery. It's a buy and a sell. And so the value system builds up from that. What I think of as the emotional content of music is probably a lot different than what you think of. Since I write music, I know what the techniques are. If I wanted to write something that would make you weep, I could do it. There's ways to do it. It's a cheap shot.
Lyons / Friedman: Would you say it's sentimental?
Frank Zappa: It's not just sentimental. There are certain harmonic climates that you can build. There are certain notes of the scale that you can play within a harmonic climate to "wreak pathos," and it's very predictable. The average guy doesn't know how predictable or easy it is to do that stuff. For example, you've got the key; it's A minor right? And you're going to play a lot of Bs in the key of A minor and that's going to give you that little twinge. Well, that music played on an accordion is not the same as the exact same notes and the same melody and same rhythm played on six bagpipes. It's a different story. So the timbre is involved too. And the amplitude is involved. If that A-minor chord is very quiet and the Bs are just smoothly put in there, that's one attitude. If it's being played by a high school marching band and it's being jammed in your face, it's sad all right, but it's not that kind of sad! In different cultures there are also different norms for how certain sounds are perceived. That's why if you listen to Chinese classical music, everything sounds like it's being played on a kazoo and it's thin and weird, but to a Chinese person, it's lush. I don't know why a person would think that the tone quality of Chinese classical music was really a warm sensation. The Chinese are different though. They've got 7,000 years behind them. Maybe after 7,000 years we're going to think that stuff sounds pretty good too.
Zappa on Zappa
Lyons / Friedman: What do you see as your greatest accomplishment and your greatest failure?
Frank Zappa: I would say my entire life has been one massive failure. Because I don't have the tools or wherewithal to accomplish what I want to accomplish. If you have an idea, and you want that idea to be done a certain way and you can't do it, what do you have? You have failure. I live with failure every day because I can't do the things that I really want to do. I can do some other stuff. I can do whatever my budget will allow me to do. Unfortunately, I have these ideas that are just too
fucking expensive. In realistic terms you're looking at a genuine daily failure syndrome. I have no fantasies about what the odds are that I'll be able to do what I want to do. It's not going to happen. Once you realize what your limitations are and realize that even if you "achieve" something it doesn't make a fucking bit of difference anyway, then you can be "okay." I enjoy sitting down here [in the home studio] all by myself typing on the Synclavier. I can do twelve hours and love it. And I know that ultimately it doesn't mean a fucking thing that I did it. It's useless. That's okay, it makes me feel good.
Lyons / Friedman: It seems that for most people that kind of isolation would lead to loneliness.
Frank Zappa: Try to imagine what the opposite of loneliness is. Think of it. Everyone in the world loves you? What is that? Realize you are in isolation. Live it! Enjoy it! Just be glad that there aren't a bunch of people who want to use up your time. Because along with all the love and admiration that's going to come from the people that would keep you from being lonely, there is the emotional freight you have to bear from people who are wasting your time, and you can't get that back. So when you're lonely and all by yourself, guess what you have? You have all your own time. That's a pretty good fucking deal. Something you couldn't buy any place else. And every time you're out being sociable and having other people be "nice" to you so you don't feel "lonely," they are wasting your time. What do you get for it? Because after they're done being nice to you they want something from you. And they've already taken your time! Loneliness, once you've come to deal with it so it is not an uncomfortable sensation, so it doesn't feel like drowning or something, is not a bad deal. It's a good deal. It's the next best thing to solitude. I'm not talking solitary confinement. Solitude. If you're sensitive to loneliness, you're going to be in trouble, because then the loneliness turns into something really painful, a horrible depression and then you die. One way or another, you just die. So who needs that shit?
Copyright 1986 by Batya Friedman and Steve Lyons Published in various forms in The Progressive (November 1986), Option Magazine (Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr 1987) and Wire Magazine (Dec/Jan 1987 issue). The text here is primarily as it appeared in The Progressive. This interview took place in late 1985 in his home studio, from 11 o'clock at night until sunrise the next morning. Zappa was a disarmingly thoughtful, lucid, witty individual, and rather warm in his own way.
From Rolling Stone, November 6th, 1986: FRANK TALK
Zappa speaks out on CDs, the PMRC, his son Dweezil and other modern topics
by David Fricke
Frank Zappa has been unusually ubiquitous of late. The controversial singer, guitarist and composer hasn't toured in two years, and his last hit was 1982's "Valley Girl," his "gag me with a spoon" duet with teenage daughter Moon Unit. But his acid wit and familiar Dutch Masters goatee and mustache have been much in evidence over the past year and a half - on radio and television, in print and, most dramatically, in federal and state congressional hearings, where he has pressed his counter-offensive against the PMRC drive for pop-music censorship.
Somehow, Zappa, who's forty-five, has also found time to oversee the burgeoning careers of his offspring (the latest to achieve success is his son Dweezil, who has a part-time job as a VJ on MTV and has just released his first LP). And he's continued to write and record new music at an astonishingly prolific rate. Night School, his upcoming album, was performed entirely on a Synclavier computer synthesizer. Three albums of his classical pieces are also in the works, along with a fourth album, London Symphony Orchestra Volume II, which will consist of previously unreleased material from the recording sessions for his 1983 collection of original compositions performed by the LSO.
For many Zappa fans, however, the big news is the recent release of ten titles from the Zappa catalog, including vintage Mothers of Invention albums, on eight compact discs. The albums range from the 1967 classics We're Only In It For The Money and Lumpy Gravy to such recordings as the 1972 big-band record The Grand Wazoo, Zappa's 1984 Off-Off-Off-Broadway-style opera, Thing-Fish, and the 1986 Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. The CDs were issued by Rykodisc, a Massachusetts-based firm whose agreement with Zappa calls for the release on CD of two dozen Zappa albums over the next three years.
Prerelease response to the first set of Zappa CDs has been extraordinary; according to Rykodisc, initial orders quadrupled in two months. "I always believed there was truly a market for this material," Zappa says bluntly. "I think sales figures will bear that out."
David Fricke
Your album catalog totals over fifty titles. How did you and Rykodisc decide which LPs to reissue on CD?
Frank Zappa:
There was actually quite a bit of arguing about what this initial release would consist of, because Don [Don Rose, president of Rykodisc] was adamant about certain albums being a part of it, like The Grand Wazoo. He wanted something from each of the eras, kind of a retrospective exhibition.
What I pitched him on was releasing material that was digital in origin or archival stuff that had never been released. The problem with CDs now, as I see it, is that people on the manufacturing end don't want to take a chance on brand-new digital product. Most CDs are repackages of old stuff. I'm happy that those old albums are available in digitized form for those people who want to hear them minus the scratches. But it's difficult to get interest in digital projects that start from scratch. And until you have things that are digital all the way through, the true possibilities of sound on CD won't come out. Most of the people who have CDs now are listening to analog material that has been digitized. The interesting part about this Rykodisc package is that there are a few selections in there that are completely digital, right from the original recordings. That includes London Symphony Orchestra, Them Or Us and Thing-Fish.
David Fricke
What kind of digital repair did you do to master tapes of the older records? We're Only In It For The Money, for example, has new digital bass and drum tracks.
Frank Zappa:
The original two-track masters - they're almost twenty years old now - didn't survive the storage at MGM. They were stored so badly that the oxide had flaked off the tape. You couldn't listen to it anymore. So the thing had to be remixed. I had to go back and find all the original elements. You listen to We're Only In It For The Money and go, "My God, there's a million edits in this thing." And they all had to be redone.
David Fricke
The London Symphony Orchestra CD includes a previously unreleased twenty-five-minute composition called "Bogus Pomp." Is it from the original sessions?
Frank Zappa:
Yeah. "Bogus Pomp" is like a symphonic suite of themes from 200 Motels. It's also a parody. There's a whole story that goes along with it. I should have stuck it in the liner notes, but I was too lazy to type it up.
David Fricke
Do you have other unreleased material you plan to issue on CD?
Frank Zappa:
What's coming out in the next release is a double CD called You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore that takes live performances going back as far as 1968. The basic idea of that album is that today in live performance there are very few bands that are actually playing anything. They go onstage with a freeze-dried show, and in many cases at least fifty percent of the show is coming out of a sequencer or is lip-synced. Audiences have missed out on the golden age, when people went onstage and took a chance, which was probably the main forte of the bands that I had.
One of the great recordings on that CD is from London in 1978. We were playing a matinee, doing "St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast" and "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," and there was this guy in the audience, completely out of his mind, who wanted to recite poetry. He came up to the stage and kept interrupting the songs. So we worked him into the set, and the result is very strange - mass-audience poetry reading.
David Fricke
You've been very active counterattacking the rock-censorship drive over the past year and a half. Are you still sending out packages of information and press clippings from your Barking Pumpkin Records office?
Frank Zappa:
I've spent up to $70,000 of my own money that I've put into a combination of my travel, printing costs and phone bills just to keep pressure on the other side. I've done maybe 300 talk shows and interviews. And those Z-pacs are still going out the door. I will continue to do it as long as people call up. [Call 818-PUM-PKIN for information on how to get one.]
David Fricke
How do you feel about your son Dweezil's success as an MTV VJ?
Frank Zappa:
If his fan mail is any indication, they got the right guy for the job. The thing that's cool about Dweezil is he's just turned seventeen. He IS a kid. He's not a guy pretending to be a kid. He's the age of the audience, and he's a genuine music fan. He knows something about the groups he's putting on. And he also knows them as individuals. The little stories he tells don't come off like showbiz stories. I'd like to see him do some specials.
Actually, Ahmet [Zappa's youngest son] auditioned for a television series yesterday, to play a character named Stinky in a Showtime sitcom. He's twelve years old, and he's not afraid to say anything to anybody. He was reading in this room for the producers, and there were these howls of laughter. Ahmet came out, and my wife asked what happened. "well," he said, "they liked me. They said they were going to bring me back to read again. I told them, 'I hope to God it's not written by the guy who wrote this crap.'"
***
Frank Zappa - The Sin In Synclavier - Mutant Timbres, Stupid Guitar Controller Tricks, & Typing Through The Tuplets.
As Told To Dan Forte
From A Definitive Tribute to Frank Zappa (Best of Guitar Player, 1994)
Zappa's work with the Synclavier computer workstation was the focus of this June 1986 Guitar Player interview. -- Editor
Because of his orchestral inclinations, Frank Zappa would seem the perfect candidate for guitar synthesist. Indeed, he has experimented with nearly every system devised with the guitar in mind. But primarily because of his unorthodox left-hand techniques, no guitar controllers have completely suited his style. Instead, he has recently worked extensively with the Synclavier, using a keyboard typewriter to input data. His innovative sounds and rhythms using this system can be heard on the Barking Pumpkin LPs Them or Us, Thing Fish, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, and Francesco Zappa, which features digital Synclavier orchestrations of the obscure eighteenth-century composer's works.
My history of working with guitar synthesizers goes back to a guitar-following device called the EWE, which stands for Electro Wagnerian Emancipator. There's only one of them; it was designed for me by Bob Easton at 360 Systems. If you played a single note, all 12 notes of the chromatic scale would be ringing, and you could make a decision as to which of those 12 to leave on and which to leave off -- and thereby select a chord that would follow parallel to whatever you played on the guitar. It worked; the only problem was the timbre of the synthesizer sound that came out was, I would say, fairly unattractive -- a real square wave sound. That is now gathering dust in the warehouse. I tried to use it on "Big Swifty" from Waka/Jawaka -- Hot Rats, but it didn't end up on the final track.
On "Be In My Video" [Them or Us], a couple of cuts from Thing Fish, and the entire Francesco Zappa album, I used the Synclavier with no sampling -- just the synthesizer sounds. The first time I used the polyphonic sampling was on Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention; all of the material on side two, except for the little instrumental section with Thing Fish taking over it, was done with the machine. And on side one, "Yo Cats," which sounds like a little jazzbo lounge group, has real drums and Ike Willis' voice, but everything else is out of the Synclavier.
I recently tried out the Modulus Graphite controller, and it had problems similar to the guitar controllers I've played before -- it just felt better as a guitar. It seemed to be a better instrument than the Roland I tried out originally with the Synclavier. The difference is that the Modulus Graphite's neck is supposed to be more stable, and you're supposed to have better isolation, less false triggering, and so forth. There was less false triggering, but for the way I play, there was still too much. I've only tried the early Roland model they had with the Synclavier, and it just wasn't right for me. If it were, I'd have the thing up and running right now. I wouldn't dissuade somebody else from buying one -- apparently there are other people who can play it and make it do wonders -- but for the way I play the guitar, and for the uses I want it for, it just seemed wrong to buy it. Instead, I enter all the data through the keyboard or the typewriter.
The Roland electronics won't read things like hammering on the string with a pick; it just chokes on that. The way in which I finger the instrument apparently is too slovenly for it to read. I don't mute every string after I play; there's no Berklee technique involved here -- I grab it and whack it. You can adjust the sensitivity within certain parameters, but if you adjust the sensitivity higher, that means it's going to pick up fewer nuances -- so where do you draw the line?
Depending on what data I'm entering, it can be inconvenient to have to do it all on keyboard or typewriter. For example, I can't just sit there and play a solo on the keyboard, because I don't think in those terms -- certainly not in real time, although I can slow the sequence down and play stuff and get some styling and phrasing. But the way in which the data is entered has a "drier" feel than if it had been played on the guitar. For one thing, on the guitar, you get to wiggle the intonation a little bit to make more subtle things happen. The tradeoff there, though, is that as you wiggle the strings and intonate it -- all that nuance stuff -- you generate masses and masses of numbers that fill your sequencer up very fast. That's certainly a liability because you can't do as many tracks of information. The bulk of the sequence is being filled up with inaudible data dealing with microtonal pitch adjustments. So a single line you might play of a minute-and-a-half duration, if you're using raw pitch, will fill up your sequence of 30,000 notes. Whereas if you type the pitches in, there's no dynamic or nuance pitch information entered that way. So you can have many more notes in your sequence and fill up all 16 tracks and still have space left over.
Allan Holdsworth came by the house with his SynthAxe, and that had some similar problems as well as some different ones, for me. One similarity is the string delay. The delay in the SynthAxe is caused by the MIDI delay, since the instrument doesn't have to count frequency like the Roland does. One set of strings tells you that the note has been initiated, and the other set tells you what the pitch is. It's insignificant delay on that end, but the MIDI delay is something I can feel. This doesn't bother some people, but for my ear and the way I want to use it, it just seemed inconvenient. Any time I can hear the sound of the pick and the after it the sound of whatever's supposed to come out, it bothers me. Even though it's just a few milliseconds apart, it makes me feel awkward.
I would have preferred it if the angle of the SynthAxe's neck had been adjustable by some sort of pivot. Everyone's body is different -- arm lengths are different; trunk lengths are different. The engineering principle is interesting and has a lot of merit, but it would be more useful if you could readjust the neck angle.
The main advantage for me with the Synclavier is that I can imagine rhythms that human beings have difficulty contemplating, let alone executing. When I'm writing for a live band, I'm constantly limited by the physical liabilities of the people who are going to play the parts. On the one hand, you can say, "You just keep practicing, be insistent, and you'll eventually get the rhythm." The truth of the matter is, the more you practice, the more the musician hates it; you're never really going to get it spot on if the person is suffering to play the rhythm. Why subject the musician to that punishment and torture when you can just type it in and get the thing mathematically exact? I'd say that a musical ideal would be a combination of the things live musicians do best and the things the machine does best blended into a type of composition that lets each element shine.
In terms of the sounds, the samples we use are mostly homemade. They're pure digital samples done in my studio. Often the factory samples originally start off on analog tape, and sometimes you can play a sample up and down the keyboard and hear this residual, unwanted, blurry gunk traveling with it. In the case of the drum set, we recorded each drum and cymbal in isolation, so that there's no residual hardware ring from other objects on the drum set. And we recorded each drum in stereo -- the snare, the kick drum, each tom, everything. The net result when you put this together into a patch and play it back on the keyboard is something surrealistically clean and perfect. I also have samples of lots of different types of guitars -- a really nice classical guitar, several steel-string guitars done with the pick and with fingers all in stereo, both ambient and close-up recording. I've got tenor sax done with full-length, eight-second tones, with natural vibrato, in stereo, with the Ben Webster "flaw attack" [laughs] -- a really unctuous tenor sax sound. We also have samples of whole orchestral chords, from the London Symphony Orchestra -- Zappa album. The LSO album was done on a 24-track digital multitrack, so you can single out string, brass, or wind sections to get really high-quality, isolated digital specimens.
For the sounds that don't resemble any other instruments, we have a whole classification of noises: one being the Evolver, where a sound starts off to be one type of an instrument, and by the time the note is finished, it's been turned into maybe two or three other instruments, all with a smooth transition. Then we have Resolvers, where different types of resynthesized vocal or instrumental timbres are located on each of the four partials, and by depressing a single key on the keyboard, you get a four-note chord that is actually four independent melody lines that resolve against each other to a final payoff. Then if you depress the key at the end of the payoff, you get a bonus of another bent. So you can have little melismas, little eight-note melodies, that occur, and all you do is push the key down, and it sings some kind of Renaissance cadence or whatever. Two of the partials could be resynthesized voices, one could be a resynthesized violin, and the other a resynthesized bassoon. Instant Renaissance ensemble when you hit each key. So you imagine what happens when you play a chord [laughs] -- it gets very absurd. It enables you to write things that you couldn't deal with under any other circumstance.
An example of one of the "impossible" things I've done is: While one instrument is keeping a steady pulse at 120, another instrument is doing a ritard, where each successive note is five milliseconds later than the note before, over a period of time. There's no accurate way to notate that, but it has an interesting feel to it because it slows down so gradually and so mathematically. You can do things like that within a bar -- little accelerandos and ritardandos in five-millisecond increments inside of one bar.
Eventually, everything goes to tape because that's how the album is manufactured, but prior to that you can do all sorts of things; there's no question that that's a big advantage. Most of the editing I do after the basic composition is entered is done on what Synclavier calls the "G Page," which shows you three tracks, each with three columns of information. One column tells you the start time, another tells you the pitch, and another tells you the duration. Once you learn how to read that, you can edit on that page very fast, and you still have access to playing things on the keyboard while you're doing your editing -- which you don't have when you're editing in the music-printing function. The keyboard is disabled when you're dealing with that; you have to do it either on the screen or in your head, or keep bouncing back and forth. If you it on the G Page, you don't actually see any notes or staff or anything -- you see numbers that represent in fractions where the beat is located in the bar.
When you're typing in the music printing section, there's a process called tupletization. It's not a real word, but it's an accurate description of what the machine does. You push a button, and then it says "tuplet." Then it asks you what kind of a tuplet you want. You give it a flavor, like 11. Then you tell the machine 11 over how many beats -- for instance, 11 over 3. Let's say it's all in 4/4: You type in tuplet 11 over 3 beats, and hit Return. The screen redraws, and now the first three beats of a 4/4 bar have been restructures. The way you deal with entering information in the music printing is, each bar of music is divided into what they call "edit blocks." For example, if you're in 4/4 and choose edit resolution 32, every time you move the cursor one degree to the right, you're moving it one 32nd-note edit block to the right. So in 4/4 with edit resolution 32, there are 32 edit blocks in the bar. If you do this tuplet thing that I just described, there are now probably 44 edit blocks over the first three beats. If you want to enter an 11-tuplet in there, you just give a couple of commands and it locates pitches inside this imaginary framework of an 11-tuplet over 3. And you're not limited to just entering 11 notes; you could enter four 32nd-notes for each eighth-note in the 11-tuplet, if you wanted, thereby winding up with a 44-tuplet. Also, if you decided that right in the middle of your 11-tuplet you wanted to have a quintuplet that began on the third note of the 11-tuplet, you give a second instruction and it gives you a second-level tuplet. We're building what is described as a nested polyrhythm -- one polyrhythm living inside of another polyrhythm. With this machine you can nest three of them. After you've entered your quintuplet starting on the third beat of the 11-tuplet, you could then decide you wanted to have a septuplet that began on the second beat of the quintuplet inside of the 11-tuplet. Or any kind of tuplet you wanted, up to the maximum resolution of the machine. After you've typed in all the stuff, you push the Play button, and by golly, there it comes -- and it's on time.
If you really want to get abstract and build your composition just on the G Page, instead of dealing with tuplets, you can deal in milliseconds. The rhythm on the G Page is determined by the start time of the note -- that's the data that lives in the left-hand column. So you can read data on the G Page in three different modes: in terms of seconds, beats, or SMPTE [time code] numbers. If you're looking at a 4/4 bar at 120 in the mode that shows you beats per bar, beat 1 is the first quarter-note, beat 2 is the second quarter-note, etc., and beat 5 is the downbeat of the next bar. But inside of that, you have resolution down to five milliseconds. You can add and delete notes on the G Page. So you can build a list that would say: There's a note on beat 1 and there's another note on beat 1.005. Then the next one could be on any arbitrary number -- you can just enter any kind of numerical scheme you want for the rhythm. For some of the kinds of rhythms I type in, my G Page tuplets look like beat 1, beat 1.07, beat 1.14 -- in other words, this whole series of notes is going to be 70 milliseconds apart. You don't even need to worry about tuplets anymore -- just go for the flow. You can have these notes be totally distinct from one another, or you can have them overlapping each other to make chordal arpeggios, just by changing the duration in the far right-hand column. In other words, if you want the notes to overlap -- if they are 70 units apart, and you want every three of them to overlap -- on the page it would look like the third note would last 70 units, the second note would last 140, and the first would last 210. The first note that plays would last the longest. The effect is like a little three-note arpeggio. That's what I do for 12 and 14 hours a day -- sit there and deal with those kinds of numbers. It is the only way to write that kind of music.
MIDI needs to be faster, because if I'm writing in those small increments of time just for the rhythm, with the types of delays that are built into using MIDI to hook things together -- it gets a little tedious when things [i.e., synth modules] talk late.
With any of the systems that are pitch-to-voltage, before the voltage counter can figure out what frequency the string is vibrating at, it has to wait until the decay of the blast of white noise that occurs when the pick hits the string goes away completely. There's no way around that that I know of. The problem with fret-switching is that it's taking us all the way back to the Guitorgan. If the fret-switching is going to tell you what the pitch is, then you've kind of got what's happening in the SynthAxe.
***
© Fred Händl
www.jazzappa.com/
www.jazzappa.com/fred
www.jazzappa.com/polaroids
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