The first music I remember hearing was Arab music when I was very young. I thought it was really good but I never heard any more after that. I never heard any classical music or anything like that. We had a pretty much unmusical family. The nearest they got to music was the stuff that was being played in the background on TV or radio, soap opera type stuff. I heard all that. As far as what you might call music to pay attention to, there wasn't any of it around.
There were some theoretical things that I saw him do—mostly to do with harmonies. He told me once that he had gotten his sense of harmony from playing the guitar [...].
Eventually some of his favorite chords got written down and categorized into what he called "the chord bible"—chords would get added to each note of a melody and the final result would be five to seven parallel voices with the melody on top. This was used for most of the large orchestra pieces I worked on. That's why Sinister Footwear has such huge wind sections—so he could have these thick chords played by individual instrumental colors. When the Synclavier arrived this system was soon forgotten. He did have some special Synclavier software created which combined music files in various ways. Steve DeFuria wrote it. Can this be considered theory? I think not—it was more of a "Lets try this and see what happens"—musical experimentations where he kept what he liked and tossed the rest of the tapes into the vault. Don't forget—he called his studio "Utility Muffin RESEARCH Kitchen". I believe he did that sort of stuff throughout his career.
I remember once we were wating in an airport and he was sitting there scribbling some stuff onto manuscript paper. I went down and I sat next to him. I had the audacity to say, "So what are you doing?" He looks at me and says, "Nothing." I slinked away. A minute later he says, "Come here, boy." And he shows me this little dictionary of chords that he was building. They were these tremendous, fat, robust 9- and 10-note chords without any doublings, and he says to me, "These are densities." I thought that was great terminology to use for a chord voicing. He said, "When I get back to L.A. I'm going to use these to compose a piece of music," and he did, some of those densities were used in the composing of Sinister Footwear.
I've been real curious about his "chord bible", which was a sort of automated way he had of harmonizing his melodies. But I heard about that from David Ocker. I'm hoping to reverse engineer some of the logic of the chord bible, but haven't gotten very far, not far enough to determine whether or not I think it's even possible. But now that I know it existed, I can see it all over the place in the score to Sinister Footwear. I just don't know its internal logic. I wish I had known about it when I worked for Frank, because I would have certainly asked him about that, and I'm sure he would have enjoyed telling me about it.
The thing that sets rock 'n' roll apart from other music—it's not the repetition, it's not the lyrics and it's not the chords—is the timbre. That's the key. You can take the same three chords from any popular rock 'n' roll song of the grossest variety, you can take "Louie Louie" and write it out for an accordion, an oboe and a harp and it's not rock & roll anymore. Even if you transcribe it note for note. On the other hand, you can take any kind of a song from another field of music and orchestrate it for a couple of fuzz tone guitars, a loud bass and a drum set with tom-tom fills and by God, it's rock 'n' roll. That timbre makes the event. Also the attack and the attitude with which the instruments are played. If you were a legit guy and you were forced to write rock 'n' roll on paper with all of the traditional terminology that they normally apply, your marking would be 'molto deliberato.'
What are you listening to outside your own work at the moment. Have you listened to any of the American new wave acts?
The American ones?
Like Television.
Yes, I've heard Television. I don't care for them too much. I heard Blondie and I like them. I have some stuff by the Stranglers which I thought was pretty good. There's a song by Lew Lewis that I thought was nice—'Caravan Man' (originally on Stiff, now deleted). And I just heard one Elvis Costello song for the first time. I thought it was really good. 'Radio Sweetheart'.
But with me now I have mostly Penderesky, Schoenburg, Webern, lute music, mediaeval vocal music, organ music, rhythm and blues, Pat Martino, Weather Report, Stravinsky, Gentle Giant, PFM, the Outlaws, two Queen cassettes, Black Sabbath, Mott The Hoople.
Still playing Black Sabbath eh?
(laughs) I like it. It's fantastic. 'Iron Man'. Are kidding me? 'Iron Man'! That's a work of art. I'm really into that. I used to like 'Supernaught' but I think 'Iron Man' is the one now.
Billy Gibbons is an original. The style that he does, although I know a lot of the blues antecedents that it was derived from, he goes like that [raises middle finger again]. You've gotta have that in your playing.
If you had to name a few songs, written by other people, that you consider to be great, what would they be?
I liked "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan. I liked "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles and "I am the Walrus." And one may not underestimate the impact of "Louie Louie," the original Richard Berry version.
Were those the only songs by Dylan and the Beatles that you like or do you like them in general?
No, those are the only ones I liked. I generally liked the Rolling Stones better than the Beatles during that era; they were a little bit more to my taste because they were more involved in the blues.
I like the group Them, with Van Morrison. And the other thing that I really enjoyed were the early compositions of David and Bacharach. I thought that they were so good because prior to that time there had been little of bitonal or polytonal harmonic implication in American pop music, and we are to thank them for providing them through those early Dionne Warwick recordings.
What do you think of the New York school of composers, such as Phillip Glass?
I'm not familiar with his music but the whole realm of the New York school of repetition music, it's like stuff to be played in the background of an art gallery. It's an atmosphere that people might enjoy participating in, but it's not my style; it's not my idea of a good time.
PLAYBOY: Did any of the big acts of the time interest you? How about Dylan, Hendrix, the Stones?
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.
Research, compilation and maintenance by Román García Albertos