From: bruceh@cray.com (Bruce T. Hill)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.frank-zappa
Subject: LA Times Interview of Frank Zappa
Summary: Frank is still kicking
Date: 16 Oct 92 00:49:23 GMT
Organization: Cray Research Superservers Inc., San Diego CA, USA

A friend sent me this article, and I have typed it in so all you
Zappa-philes will have something to talk about here.


In the October 1, 1992 Los Angeles Times:

Zapping Those Rumors

o  New music: After illness forced him to cut short a European tour, Frank
   Zappa is back in harness.  Says a friend of the composer: 'He's just not 
   going to be bothered by something as stupid as cancer.'

By RIP RENSE - Special to the Times  (reproduced here without permission!)

Los Angeles - Scotch the grim rumors, says Frank Zappa.  He says he's 
not written his last note of music, and is not breathing his last breaths,
as some European media claim.

"Just describe the stuff as melodramatic fiction," said the 51-year-old
Zappa, who is battling prostate cancer.  "What ever it is, it's highly 
exaggerated."

The reports appeared last week after Zappa canceled his part in "The 
Yellow Shark," a series of European concerts of his orchestral music.
Zappa hosted and partially conducted two of the initial concerts at the
Frankfurt Festival Sept. 17-19, then flew back to L.A., too ill to 
continue.  His condition has since improved, and the concerts by the 
highly regarded Ensemble Modern were completed in Berlin and Vienna 
without him.

"Point one, it's not my last composition." said Zappa in an exclusive 
interview from his Laurel Canyon home.  "Point two, it's not the last 
concert of my music that's going to occur, and point three, I'm in 
negotiations currently with the Vienna Festival to do an opera for 
the '94 season."

For much of the last year, Zappa practically sequestered himself in his
home studio to write new works commissioned by the Ensemble, an 
international group of 25 classically trained musicians specializing 
in modern music (which recently drew critical praise for a John Cage 
tribute at the Frankfurt Festival).

Named after a fiberglass fish that used to rest against Zappa's 
listening-room fireplace, "The Yellow Shark" is a 90-minute program of 
transcriptions and new arrangements of existing Zappa works, such as 
"Be-Bop Tango," "Pound for a Brown," "G-Spot Tornado," "Dog Breath" 
and "Uncle Meat" (here combined as a suite, "Dog/Meat") and new compositions:
"Chunnel Mr. Boogins," "Amnerica," "Get whitey," "Welcome to America,"
"None of the Above".

The sell out performances, which were painstakingly rehearsed with 
Zappa's guidance over a period of months in both L.A. and Frankfurt, 
were critically and popularly hailed (and broadcast live on German 
pay-per-view television).  Although Zappa's orchestral music has been 
recorded and performed by Kent Nagano and the London Symphony as well 
as by Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Inter-Contemporaine (Boulez, in 
fact, commissioned Zappa's "The Perfect Stranger"), "The Yellow Shark"
is a milestone in Zappa's career as a composer of "serious" music.

The first night in Frankfurt, which ended with Zappa conducting 
"G-Spot Tornado" as the La La La Human Steps dance ensemble swirled 
about him, was hailed with a 20-minute ovation.

"Well, by  modern music standards, this would be an astonishing 
maybe even historic, success," said Zappa, whose famous mustache 
and "lip-T" arrangement are mostly gray now, "because of the audience 
response to it, and the type of audience that attended.  And the 
audience was probably 50-50 'suits' versus young people.  We even 
had a bunch of 70-year-olds out there getting off on it.

"You know what normally happens at a modern music concert.  If you 
have an audience of 500, it's a success, and you're talking about 
averaging 2,000 seats a night in these places, and massive, lengthy 
encore-demanding applause at the end of the shows.  Stunned expressions 
on the faces of the musicians, the concert organizers, the managers, 
everybody sitting there with their jaws on the floor.  They never 
expected anything like this."

On the second night, Zappa was too ill to go on.  The concert went 
ahead, yet "they got the same response from the audience - it surprised
the hell out of everybody."  Zappa returned the third night, but his 
stamina gave out.  While Zappa was weighing the prospects of going on 
to Berlin, his condition worsened, and he returned home Sept. 22, 
by ambulance.  He was well enough to resume work by Friday.  "It 
was a rough trip for me," he acknowledged.

Rough, but satisfying.

"I've never had such an accurate performance at any time for that 
kind of music that I do," the composer said, a trace of amazement 
in his tone.  "The dedication of the group to playing it right and 
putting the 'eyebrows' on it [Zappa-ese for intuitive, spontaneous 
musical histrionics] is something that - it would take your breath 
away.  You would have to have seen how grueling the rehearsals were,
and how meticulous the conductor, Peter Rundel, was in trying to get 
all the details of this stuff worked out....It's nice that the 
concerts still went on, that the audiences seemed to like it more 
and more. And that I don't have to stand there and be Mr. Carnival 
Barker to draw 'em in.  They're coming anyway!"

Since learning of his illness in early 1990, the iconoclastic musician 
has missed few days' work.  He's stayed awake many a night - all night -
composing at his Synclavier.

Zappa does not discuss his illnes or treatments in any detail, saying 
merely, "I feel pretty good.  I have mostly good days.  I have some 
bad days, but they're not too often."  He looks healthy - if anything, 
he looks comfortably middle-aged, with a well articulated paunch and 
professorial tortise-shell glasses.  As one person close to him put 
it: "He's just not going to be bothered by something stupid as cancer."

In terms of sheer new material, Zappa has never been more productive.
In addition to "The Yellow Shark" project, he has produced, edited 
and released a total of five double-CD packages of concert material 
since 1990 (six if you include "Playground Psychotics," an earthy 
assembly of "Flo and Eddie"-period Mothers of Invention music, 
circa 1971-72, due this month) on both Ryko and his own Barking 
Pumpkin Records.  Three of the packages finish off the six twin-CD 
set, "You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore," a sweeping compendium 
of live Zappa material dating from the late '60s to 1988.  He also 
arranged with Rhino Records to issue the recent "Beat the Boots" 
series, the legal release of 15 (so far) "best" Zappa bootlegs.

And, in the coming months, he will release a double CD of "The 
Yellow Shark" concerts, plus a follow-up to his first recorded 
symphonic venture, the 1967 avant-garde ballet "Lumpy Gravy."  
Titled "Civilization: Phase III," it will feature a piece of 
music he has labored over intermittently for 10-years titled "N-light."

Composed on the Synclavier, "N-light" is one of Zappa's most 
substantial works.  The title is a computer code referring to two 
moments in the piece - one that reminded Zappa of the Village 
People's "In the Navy" and a sonic cluster he dubbed "Thousand 
Points of Light."

The "Yellow Shark" music is dense, elaborate sound sculpture, with 
complex rythmic and tonal demands on the players.

Zappa's major influences - avant-garde composer Edgard Varese, Boulez 
and Stravinsky - are subliminally in evidence, but this is not 
derivative music.  There's also a touch of Spike Jones at work; Zappa 
makes use of whatever absurdities he happens across.

At an early "Yellow Shark" rehearsal, a grotesque letter to the editor 
of PFIQ, a body-piercing magazine, was recited by one of the musicians 
from inside a piano, while the Ensemble bleated and groaned according 
to Zappa's directions.  In one "Yellow Shark" segment, an Ensemble 
member recites bits of "Struwwelpeter," a series of grim German 
children's tales designed to discourage unhealthy habits (translated 
to English by Mark Twain).

"I went to dinner at Andreas' house [Andreas Molich-Zebhauser, 
Ensemble Modern general manager]," said Zappa, taking a drag on a 
cigarette, "and his children demanded that I look at their book, 
'Struwwelpeter.' ... They were pointing out this part with the 
tailor chopping the thumbs off [a thumb-sucker].  I went, 'What 
is this?' I mean, his children are growing up with this.  Imagine 
the psychosis!  I said, well, it's music.  Better be in the show."

For years, Molich-Zebhauser admired the fiberglass creature in 
Zappa's home, so much so that the composer finally gave it away to 
him - writing a little deed to get it through customs that said, 
"This is Andreas' own personal yellow shark."

"The next thing I know," said Zappa, "the whole project is being 
called 'The Yellow Shark.'  It sounds really good in German, and I 
said it sounds really dorky in English.  But what are you going to 
call it?  Doesn't make any difference."

The use of "Struwwelpeter" and the fiberglass fish exemplifies
Zappa's aesthetic "AAAFNRAA" - "Anything Anytime Anyplace For 
No Reason At All".

If that sounds a bit Cage-ian, it is.  Without Cage, Zappa said, 
much of what takes place in modern music and art "would not be 
possible."  Including, perhaps, the Ensemble Modern's dedication to 
realizing new sounds.

"One of the things I like about the Ensemble Modern is that they're 
interested in sound just for its own sake," Zappa said of the 
Frankfurt-based group.

"At one rehearsal, one of the horn players picked his horn up off the 
floor, and it scraped and made a noise.  And I said, 'Do it again,' 
and the next thing you know, we had the entire brass section taking
their instruments and scraping the bells back and forth across the 
floor, making this grinding, grunting sound."

It may surprise some that Zappa is writing for humans again (outside 
a rock'n'roll context).  He has long been frustrated by the slightest
human error during performance.  His ear is uncompromisingly keen; he 
routinely hears glitches others don't.  Like his friend Boulez, he is 
mainly concerned with precise execution of tone and rhythm and sonic 
exploration.  With his increasing involvmenmt with the Synclavier, 
evidenced by his Grammy-winning LP, "Jazz From Hell", in 1986, it 
seemed that Zappa had finally abandoned human musicians for an 
ideal "orchestra" - a computer that could produce any sound he 
could imagine.

No Frank Zappa interview would be complete without politics.  Zappa, 
who was seriously exploring the idea of running for President when 
his health sidetracked him, follows the scene avidly via CNN and 
C-SPAN.  Did the man who took on Tipper Gore and the Parents Music 
Resource Center on the issue of censoring pop music watch the 
conventions? You bet!

"I was so irate at the carryings-on at the Republican convention," he said.
"I thought that if I can do anything to make sure that George Bush 
doesn't get elected again - up to and including shaking hands with 
Tipper Gore - I'll do it.  I mean, it's that bad... I take back every
bad thing I ever said about Clinton and Gore...Whoever or whatever 
George Bush is, if you look at his friends, or his fellow travelers, 
I don't want to see those fellow travelers anywhere near Washington, D.C.
Enough already with Pat Robertson and these guys!  So I even considered 
calling the Clinton campaign and say I'd be happy to give them an 
endorsement if they thought it would be beneficial to them.  They 
might want to run screaming in the other direction.

A final question was posed.  How does the new music - specifically, 
"The Yellow Shark" project - fit into an overall historical context 
in the long, highly colorful career of Frank Zappa?

He paused longer than usual as he considered the question.  "Aside 
from the fact that it's been a lot of fun to work on it,"  he said, 
his voice suddenly dropping, "I think that it's helped my health. 
It's pretty important to me."

-- 
Bruce T. Hill @ Cray Research Superservers, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA
Email: bruceh@cray.com  Phone: (619) 625-3746  FAX: (619) 625-0641
Humorous quotation:  Nobody looks good wearing _brown_lipstick_. --Frank Zappa
Newsgroups: alt.fan.frank-zappa