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Frank Zappa 1993 Playboy Interview
Category: School, College, Greek
Playboy: You once said that your job is "extrapolating everything to its most absurd extreme." Does that still hold true
Frank Zappa: It's one of my jobs. I guess it must have been my main job that day. But yes, I like carrying things to their most ridiculous extreme because out there on the fringe is where my type of entertainment lies.
Playboy: Is it frustrating that more people don't get it?
Frank Zappa: The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn't, then blow it out your ass. I do it to amuse myself. If I like it, I release it. If somebody else likes it, that's a bonus.
Playboy: How important is it to offend people?
Frank Zappa: You mean, do I wake up and say, "I think I'll go out and offend somebody today"? I don't do that. I don't write lyrics much anymore, but I offend people just as much with the music itself. I put chords together that I like, but many people want rhythms that they can march to or dance to; they get tangled up trying to tap their foot to my songs. Some people don't like that, which is OK with me.
Playboy: You certainly offended people with the Phi Zappa Krappa poster.
Frank Zappa: Probably. But so what?
Playboy: And some of your antics from the Mothers of Invention days, like the famed gross-out contest.
Frank Zappa: There never was a gross-out contest. That was a rumor. Somebody's imagination ran wild. Chemically bonded imagination. The rumor was that I went so far as to eat shit onstage. There were people who were terribly disappointed that I never ate shit onstage. But no, there never was anything resembling a gross-out contest.
Playboy: Another rumor was that you peed on an audience.
Frank Zappa: I never had my dick out onstage and neither did anybody else in the band. We did have a stuffed giraffe rigged with a hose and an industrial-strength whipped cream dispenser. Under it we had a cherry bomb. That's how we celebrated the Fourth of July in 1967. Somebody waved the flag, lit the cherry bomb. It blew the ass out of the giraffe. Another guy reached behind the giraffe and pushed the button and had this thing shitting whipped cream all over the stage. That amused people for some reason.
Playboy: So it was simply contained outrageousness?
Frank Zappa: Stagecraft.
Playboy: To entertain or just to alleviate boredom?
Frank Zappa: There was a third factor, too. There's an art statement in whipped cream shooting out the ass of a giraffe, isn't there? We were carrying on the forgotten tradition of dada stagecraft. The more absurd, the better I liked it.
Playboy: The titles of your records and songs are art statements, too.
Frank Zappa: Well, you have to call them something, so why not call them something amusing?
Playboy: For example, Burnt Weeny Sandwich?
Frank Zappa: I still eat burnt weeny sandwiches. It's one of the great things in life. At least it's a great lunch. You take a Hebrew National, put it on a fork, burn it on the stove, wrap two pieces of bread around it, squirt some mustard on it, eat it and you're back to work.
Playboy: You've also used your songs to level political attacks. You wrote Rhymin' Man about Jesse Jackson. What made you so angry?
Frank Zappa: An article raised some questions about whether or not Martin Luther King actuallyy died in Jesse's arms. There were reports that Jackson dipped his hands into King's blood or even used chicken blood and rubbed it on his shirt, which we wore for a few days afterward as he met the media. So I did this song about the idea of communicating through nursery rhymes, as Jackson is prone to do. It rubs me the wrong way. I'm not saying that all of Jesse's ideas are bad; I agree with some of them. But I'm not confident that Jesse Jackson would be the person I would look to to implement any of them. I don't want to see any religious people in public office because they're working for another boss.
Playboy: You also assailed former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in a song.
Frank Zappa: HBO ran something like "Dr. Koop Answers Your Questions About AIDS." On it, I saw him explain how AIDS got from the green monkey to the human population. He speculated about a native who wanted to eat a green monkey, who skinned it, cut his finger and some of the green monkey's blood got into his blood. The next thing you know, you have this blood-to-blood transmission of the disease. I mean, this is awful fucking thin. It's right up there with Grimm's Fairy Tales. And Koop was such a cartoon character with that uniform and everything. Before Ronald Reagan, when did you ever see a surgeon general dressed up like the guy in the Katzenjammer Kids?
Playboy: Because of songs such as Dinah Moe Humm ("I got a forty-dollar bill say you can't make me come"), He's So Gay and many others, you have been accused of being sexist, misogynistic and homophobic.
Frank Zappa: Some people miss the joke. In general, I was a convenient enemy and they could get exposure for their causes by coming after me. But I'm not antigay. When Ross Perot announced he was running for president, I wanted him to choose Barney Frank as a vice-presidential candidate. He is one of the most impressive guys in Congress. He is a great model for young gay men.
Playboy: But you were criticized for Bobby Brown Goes Down and He's So Gay.
Frank Zappa: But see, I'm a journalist of a sort. I have a right to say what I want to say about any topic. If you don't have a sense of humor, then tough titties.
Playboy: is that what you said when you were attacked by the Anti-Defamation League for Jewish Princess?
Frank Zappa: They wanted to convince the world that there's no such thing as a Jewish princess, but, I'm sorry, the facts speak for themeselves. They asked me to apologize and I refused. I still have their letter nailed to the wall. They got a lot of mileage out of it, but it was a tempest in a teapot. They just wanted to give the impression that here, in the world of rock, was this rabid anti-Semite who was besmirching the fine reputation of everybody of the Jewish faith. Well, I didn't make up the idea of a Jewish princess. They exist, so I wrote a song about them. If they don't like it, so what? Italians have princesses, too.
Playboy: Is there rhyme or reason behind the subjects you choose to attack?
Frank Zappa: Whatever I'm mad at at the time. I like things that work. If something doesn't, the first question you have to ask is, Why? if it's not working and you know why, then you have to ask, "Why isn't somebody doing something about it?" The government, for starters. Most institutions. The nation's education system is completely fucked up.
Playboy: Fucked up how?
Frank Zappa: The schools are worthless because the books are worthless. They still are on the level of George Washington and the cherry tree and "I cannot tell a lie." The books have all been bowdlerized by committees responding to pressure from right-wing groups to make every aspect of the history books consistent with the cryptofascist view-point. When you send your kids to school, that's what they're dealing with. Your children are being presented with these documents, part of a multibillion-dollar industry, which are absolutely fraudulent. Kids' heads are crammed with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The U.S. school system as a whole qualifies.
Playboy: Did you find alternative schools for your kids?
Frank Zappa: In California you can take your kids out of school at 15 if they can pass the equivalency test, so the first three have escaped. Diva still has a couple of years to go.
Playboy: Before they escaped, how did you deal with it?
Frank Zappa: We had them in public school and private school, back and forth, trying to find the best possible education that we could get for them.
Playboy: Regardless of what they learned at school, they certainly must get an education around here.
Frank Zappa: There definitely is a little stimulation around here. They meet a lot of people from all over the world and of all different nationalities and races and business backgrounds. The kids aren't shoveled into a room.
Playboy: Did the perspective you gave them prepare them for those bad schools?
Frank Zappa: It caused them trouble, because when they compared what qualifies as the real world here in this house with what they experienced as the real world in school, it was very different. Sometimes their friends think they're weird. On the other hand, their friends like to spend the night over here.
Playboy: Were the teachers horrified?
Frank Zappa: Some of them. They had a few teachers who were great. One could have taught a couch to read. She was fired because she wasn't Mexican. The school had an ethnic quota, and she was out.
Playboy: If Tipper Gore was right and exposure to an uncensored world is bad for kids, your kids must be monsters.
Frank Zappa: My kids do OK. I like them a lot and they seem to like me and their mother. They don't use drugs. They don't drink. They don't even eat meat.
Playboy: What have you said to your kids about drugs?
Frank Zappa: All I told them was, "You see examples of drug-crazed people on television and all you have to do is look at those assholes." They get the point. The biggest thing you can do for kids is give them the ability to figure things out. I use a risk-reward program. One of my kids comes to me and tells me he or she wants to do something. I say no if I don't think it's a good idea. If they can convince me, logically, that I'm wrong, they get to do it.
Playboy: You're creating your worst nightmare: a house full of lawyers.
Frank Zappa: I don't think we have to worry about any of them becoming lawyers. But it does help to develop reasoning and communication skills - you might even call it sales skills - to manage to get your way in a fast and efficient manner. I don't think it hurts. Look at the alternative: They could go "Wah-wah-wah" or break things, or sneak. We don't have very much in the way of tantrums or sneakage problems. I look at kids as little people. The little people have certain assets and liabilities. They're born with an unbound imagination. They're born without fear and prejudice. On the other hand, they don't have the mechanical skills to do big-person stuff. But if you treat them like people, they'll learn. If you think of them as your precious little commodities and you want to mold them and shape them into something that you imagine for them, it breeds problems.
Playboy: You obviously don't buy the argument that you have to give your kids something to rebel against.
Frank Zappa: Well, my children certainly have decided not to grow up like me. They don't smoke. They don't eat hamburgers or bacon. They find their own way. I just want to keep them out of trouble and make sure that they can get to adulthood with some sort of marketable skill and a chance for a happy life on their own terms. I don't want them to be like me or like Gail. They should be like them. And they should be as well equipped to be themselves as possible. As parents we have to do everything to give them the equipment to be themselves, so that when they go out into the world they can maintain their identity and still survive.
Playboy: Would they have been different had you named them Sally or John?
Frank Zappa: It's the last name that gets them into trouble.
Playboy: How?
Frank Zappa: I'm viewed as being weird. When somebody calls you weird, then anything you touch becomes weird. On the other hand, they like being weird.
Playboy: And their first names distinguish them for anyone unconvinced by their last name?
Frank Zappa: I want them to be different. I know that the people in these schools will never be different because they're afraid to be different. But my kids are genetically different, so they might as well be different all the way.
Playboy: Chastity Bono once told a reporter how terrible her name is. She said when she complained, Sonny reminded her, "Be thankful we didn't name you Dweezil." Have any of your kids threatened to change their names?
Frank Zappa: No. I think they like them, though you'd have to ask them. We all get along well. That seems to be a rare thing in a family today. The family itself is a vanishing artifact. In the Nineties, if you have a family and the people inside the family have affection for one another, it's kind of a miracle. It's mutant behavior. I mean, they yell and scream at one another like any other kids. But most of the time they play together.
Playboy: How did you meet Gail?
Frank Zappa: She was working at the Whiskey a-Go-Go in L.A. I fell in love with her instantly.
Playboy: Is it true you didn't give her a wedding ring;
Frank Zappa: I didn't have one, so when we got married, I pinned a ballpoint pen on her dress. It was a maternity dress because she was nine months pregnant.
Playboy: These days, particularly in your profession, twenty-five-year marriages are uncommon. Why has yours lasted?
Frank Zappa: We both are busy with what we care about. She's good at what she does, and I leave her alone when it comes to that. I spent so much time on the road that we were always glad to see each other when the tours were over. The other thing is I guess we like each other.
Playboy: Is there a lot of music in your house? What music do your kids listen to?
Frank Zappa: When Ahmet was in sixth grade, he liked Fiddler on the Roof and Oliver! Recently he discovered Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. Diva likes rap music of all languages. Moon likes dance-oriented stuff. Dweezil likes anything with a guitar in it.
Playboy: How do you like his music?
Frank Zappa: The best of it, I think, is his instrumental music, which is very involved technically; the rhythms and intervals are complicated and his execution is spotless.
Playboy: How about you? Have you lost your interest in rock and roll?
Frank Zappa: My main interest is composition - getting an idea and manifesting it in a way that people can listen to.
Playboy: How much has technology changed your music?
Frank Zappa: Without the computer I would still be at the mercy of musicians to play my music. I would also be at the mercy of governmental and civic entities that fund performances.
Playboy: After your last tour, you said you wouldn't be touring again.
Frank Zappa: Well, I couldn't afford it. I lost ..$ 400,000 on it and I don't wish to experience that again.
Playboy: Do you ever miss the -
Frank Zappa: Rock-and-roll life? No.
Playboy: How about the experience of the performance?
Frank Zappa: A little bit. Every once in a while I, feel like playing the guitar, but I stop and think what I'd have to go through in order to do it. The urge goes away.
Playboy: Is it particularly gratifying to get commissions such as the one from the Frankfurt Festival last year?
Frank Zappa: That one was really something. It was a whole evening of my music, which was part of a whole week of my music, new pieces and old. It was performed in Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna.
Playboy: Do you have any theories about why your music has been more popular in Europe than in America?
Frank Zappa: Germans, in particular, have a history of supporting new composition. They also have a viable contemporary tradition of new music that gets funded and performed regularly.
Playboy: Was it always your goal to do classical music?
Frank Zappa: That's where I started. I didn't write rock and roll until I was in my twenties, but I started writing other kinds of music. I couldn't play it, I could only write it.
Playboy: Where did the interest come from?
Frank Zappa: I liked the way music looked on paper. It was fascinating to me that you could see the notes and somebody. who knew what they were doing would look at them and music would come out. I thought it was a miracle. I was always interested in graphics, and I spent most of my creative time in my early days in school drawing pictures. I got a Speedball pen and a jar of Higgins India ink and some music paper and, shit, I could draw those.
Playboy: It was originally about a picture, not a sound?
Frank Zappa: Yes. And then I got someone to play it. I went to my grandmother's funeral when I was little and I sat there looking at the candles. The choir was singing, and when they would sing a note, the candles would respond to it. I didn't know why. I was a little kid; what the fuck did I know about physics? But it was a physical manifestation of a sound. I remembered it; I put it in the memory bank to see what I could do with it later. It shows how bored I was at the funeral.
Playboy: Did your parents play music,
Frank Zappa: No. We had a very unmusical household.
Playboy: Your father worked with poison gas for a living. Did you understand the implications of that?
Frank Zappa: Yeah. I just took it as a fact of life. We lived in a place where we were obliged to have gas masks hanging on the wall in case the tanks broke, because you could die. Thinking back on it, if those tanks had broken, those gas masks wouldn't have saved us.
Playboy: How close were the tanks?
Frank Zappa: There were tanks of mustard gas next to the Army housing we lived in. We were right down the street from this shit. We had a rack in the hall, with Daddy's mask, Momma's mask and Frank's mask hanging on it. I used to wear mine all the time. It was my space helmet. There was a can at the end of the hose that had the filtration unit in it, and I always wondered what was in it. I took a can opener and unscrewed it to find out how it worked. My father got very upset when I opened it up because I broke it and he would have to get me another one, which he never did. I was defenseless.
Playboy: Were your parents religious,
Frank Zappa: Pretty religious.
Playboy: Church and confession?
Frank Zappa: Oh, yeah. They used to make me go. They tried to make me go to Catholic school, too. I lasted a very short time. When the penguin came after me with a ruler, I was out of there.
Playboy: So you were headstrong.
Frank Zappa: Yeah. I still went to church regularly, though, until I was eighteen years old. Then suddenly, the light bulb went on over my head. All the mindless mobidity and discipline was pretty sick - bleeding this, painful that and no meat on Friday. What is this shit?
Playboy: Is the irreverence and outrageousness in your music a reaction to being a good Catholic boy?
Frank Zappa: Well, I think it was possible to do what I've done only because I escaped the bondage of being a devout believer. To be a good member of the congregation, ultimately you have to stop thinking. The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden story. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could still be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.
Playboy: Did the end of your refigiousness coincide with your step into rock and roll?
Frank Zappa: It was right about the same time. I was pretty isolated. There weren't any cultural opportunities in Lancaster. You couldn't just go to a concert. There was nothing.
Playboy: Were you tempted by drugs?
Frank Zappa: All you'd have to do was look at the people who used them and that was enough. People would do frightening things and think it was fantastic. Then they would discuss it endlessly with the next guy, who had taken the same drug. I tried marijuana and waited for something to happen. I got a sore throat and it made me sleepy. I'd look at them and go, "Why?" I'm not going to be Bill Clinton and say I never inhaled. I did inhale. I couldn't understand what the big attraction was. I liked tobacco a lot better.
Playboy: Were you involved in other aspects of the counterculture?
Frank Zappa: In order to be a part of it, you had to buy into the whole drug package. You had to have been experienced, in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word. And all the people I knew who had been experienced were on the cusp of being zombies.
Playboy: Was it disconcerting that your audiences were high much of the time?
Frank Zappa: The worst part of it for me was that I really didn't like the smell of marijuana. I had to go into a place that had the purple haze and work for a couple of hours in that. They were entitled to do whatever they wanted, so long as they didn't drive into me under the influence of it.
Playboy: But you told people drugs were stupid, before Nancy Reagan did.
Frank Zappa: One of the reasons we weren't rabidly popular at that time was that I said what was on my mind about drugs.
Playboy: Did you feel like an outsider? It's safe to say that every other major rock star in those days was
Frank Zappa: Looped. It wasn't just the other musicians but the people in the band. The guys in the band who wished they could do drugs couldn't because it meant unemployment. I was unpopular for it. As for the rock stars, if you've met them, you know that they generally have very little on their minds. I never had any great desire to hang out with them.
Playboy: Did any of the big acts of the time interest you? How about Dylan, Hendrix, the Stones?
Frank Zappa: Some of the really good things that Hendrix did was the earliest stuff, when he was just ripping and brutal. Manic Depression was my favorite Jimi Hendrix song. The more experimental it got, the less interesting and the thinner it got. As for Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited was really good. Then we got Blonde on Blonde and it started to sound like cowboy music, and you know what I think of cowboy music. I liked the Rolling Stones.
Playboy: Did Mick Jagger once pull a splinter out of your toe?
Frank Zappa: Yeah. He came by my house and I was hopping around because of this splinter, so he pulled it out. Good story, huh? I did like his attitude and the Stones' attitude. Ultimately, though, the music was being done because it was product. It was pop music made because there was a record company waiting for records.
Playboy: Is that why you founded Straight Records?
Frank Zappa: I naively thought that if there was some venue for nonstandard material, the material would find a market. But it failed because it was independent and had in dependent distribution. We lost our butt on that one. So the only way you can really do an independent label is to distribute through a major that has some clout to collect from the retailers.
Playboy: How are your current labels, Barking Pumpkin and Zappa Records, doing?
Frank Zappa: We have a very loyal fan base in several countries. Although the sales figures worldwide aren't anywhere near what the big rock stars would do if they released an album, the people who like what we do are very enthusiastic about it. That gives you a certain amount of leverage with record companies. You hook up with a major distributor but still control what you do. Since I have a record company of my own that controls the masters, the amount I make per unit - as the record company as opposed to the artist - is substantially more. I can sell three units and stay in business.
Playboy: What inspired you to form your first band, the Black-Outs?
Frank Zappa: In Lancaster there wasn't any rock and roll, unless you listened to it on a record. Most of the people who liked R..&B were not the white sons and daughters of the alfalfa farmers or defense workers who lived there. There were a number of Mexicans and a lot of black kids, and they liked that kind of stuff. So I put together this racially mixed ensemble that liked to play that kind of music. We banged our heads against the wall just like every other garage band, trying to figure out how to play, it. There's no guidebook.
Playboy: Were you playing high school dances?
Frank Zappa: No, they wouldn't let us. I had to mount my own events. One time we rented the Lancaster Women's Club to put on a dance. When the authorities heard that there was going to be this rock-and-roll dance in their little cowboy community, they arrested me at six that evening for vagrancy. I spent the night in jail. it was right out of a teenage movie. But the dance went off anyway.
Playboy: Did that group metamorphose into the Mothers of Invention?
Frank Zappa: That was just a high school band. After I got out of high school and moved away, I played other kinds of gigs, like a short stint with Joe Perrino and the Mellotones. We are allowed to play one twist number per night. The rest was Happy Birthday, Anniversary Waltz and all the standards. I wore a little tux and strummed chords, bored. I got sick of that and stuck my guitar in the case and put it behind the sofa and left it there for eight months. I got a job doing greeting card designs, and for fun I wrote chamber music. I ran into some people who knew a guy named Paul Buff who had a studio. I started doing some worker over there. I met Ray Collins, who was working weekend gigs with the Soul Giants. He got into a fistfight with the guitar player. They needed a substitute guitar player in a hurry, so he called me. I got really involved and learned how hard it is to run a band, especially if you are trying to put together some nonstandard musical offering with no money. You try to convince a musician that it is a worth-while thing to do, when deep in his heart every rock musician thinks that he, too, should be the fourth member of Cream or the eighteenth Beatle. That group of people became the Mothers, anyway.
Playboy: So named because?
Frank Zappa: I don't know. We chose the name on Mother's Day.
Playboy: Do you look at those as the good old days?
Frank Zappa: I look at those as the old days. But we did have fun.
Playboy: What was the music scene like?
Frank Zappa: Pretty bizarre. it was the days of all these Sixties bands, including Jefferson | 
tired
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imaginative
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Tax the FUCK out of the churches!
Well, I believe that those energies and processes exist. I just don't think that they've been adequately described or adequately named yet, because people are too willing to make it all into something that supports a religious theory of one flavor or another. If you start defining these things in nuts-and-bolts scientific terms, people reject it because it's not fun, y'know. It takes some of the romance out of being dead ... because of people's desires to have eternal life and to extend their influence from beyond the grave ... all that Houdini type stuff ... but basically, I think when you're dead ... you're dead. It comes with the territory.
Anybody hear the great news, today? Jimmy Swaggart under investigation! Oh Ja-eezus! One day every one of those cocksuckers will get caught! I understand in the case of Mr. Swaggart, that he claims that it was not multiple encounters with many prostitutes -- apparently, only one sweet young thing. And he did tell Cal Thomas of the Moral Majority that the sex act itself was not fully consumated. However he did admit to doing something por-no-graphic with the girl. Let's use our imaginations, ladies and gentlemen.
My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.
The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow "J" on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?
contemplative
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