a selection of Frank quotes. My favorite is numba 17:
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe.
Tobacco is my favorite vegetable.
There is no hell. There is only France.
Don't mind your make-up, you'd better make your mind up.
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
It is always advisable to be a loser if you cannot become a winner.
A mind is like a parachute. It doesnt work if it's not open.
If we can't be free at least we can be cheap.
Sometimes you got to get sick before you can feel better.
You can't be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.
There will never be a nuclear war; there's too much real estate involved.
Consider for a moment any beauty in the name Ralph.
Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?
Outdoors for me is walking from the car to the ticket desk at the airport
You drank beer, you played golf, you watched football - WE EVOLVED!
You have just destroyed one model XQJ-37 nuclear powered pansexual roto-plooker....and you're gonna have to pay for it.
Interviewer: "So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?"
FZ: "You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?"
Without deviation from the norm, 'progress' is not possible.
Who are the brain police?
The people of your century no longer require the service of composers.
A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway.
There are more love songs than anything else.
If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.
Hey, you know something people? I'm not black, but there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white.
Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them in the ass.
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish. The other two are growing on you!
May your sh#t come to life and kiss you on the face.
Let's not be too rough on our own ignorance, it's what makes America great.
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST.
Beauty is a pair of shoes that makes you wanna die.
The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.
This tour will shirley be another great one. Around $50 and very small venues. He's playing Flag! Definitely spreading the love around. Do yourself a favor and hear this band whether you loved his Pop or knot.
I'm not much for tribute bands but after watching the Zappa Plays Zappa documentary decided Dweezil had the chops, character and pedigree to cover his dad's music.
Took in Dweezil's show at The Commodore last night with Jim Brennan and friends.
HUGE AND AMAZING!
They opened with Zombie Woof and did awesome covers of Cosmic Debris and Penguins in Bondage along with many more.
Peaches en Regalia and a weird one called Moggio were real highlights.
Scheila Gonzales is a MONSTER and her 10 minute solo reminded me of the late Michael Brecker.
Smaller scale this tour. A back to the bars event. Excellent show. Continues to master Frank's songs and advance the music to old fans and those who missed out. Dweezil, he's so hot this year!
The Soul Giants were a struggling R&B cover band in Pomona in the mid-1960s when lead singer Ray Collins fired the group's guitarist and invited a musical collaborator from Rancho Cucamonga to take his place. His name was Frank Zappa.
The band soon began morphing into the Mothers of Invention, the avant-garde novelty rock group that was Zappa's vision. But Collins' "extraordinary pop-operatic vocals best conveyed" the band's "not-so-mock rage," according to the New Rolling Stone Record Guide.
When tension with Zappa caused Collins to leave the band in the late 1960s, he also essentially left behind his music career. For a time, he drove a taxi in Los Angeles and in recent years had lived out of his van in Claremont.
Collins died Dec. 24 at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center after a heart attack. He was believed to be 75.
The LA Philharmonic has announced its 2013-2014 season. In the LA Times article is this:
...a world premiere concert performance of Frank Zappa's "200 Motels...
...For "Inside Out," the Phil also will bring back several old friends of the realm. Dudamel will alternate at the podium with his predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who will conduct several concerts, including the "200 Motels" program on Oct. 23, the anniversary date of the hall's official opening. Salonen was friends with Zappa, the iconoclastic L.A. composer who died in 1993.
Zappa was one of my teenage influences, even saw him in concert in high school, the You Are What You Is tour. Don't think I could sit through an orchestra playing Zappa music, though. Particularly his orchestral music.
Wow at Survival's post:
I didn't realize there was a fourth kid.
She sure has her dad's nose.
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Re: orchestral performances
It took me years to warm up to ANY! of Zappa's music.
For years I thought the guy was a total clown.
Not until I was introduced to the modern, fusion (whatever yah wanna call'm) jazz bands...
Such as Weather Report, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, etc...
did I appreciate Frank's music.
Then it took me a long time to get past his popular classics and begin to appreciate his more 'out there' stuff...
Such as his lead on 'Truck Driver Divorce' or the frenetic 'Stevie's Spanking'.
But as quoted upthread:
Without deviation from the norm, 'progress' is not possible.
Familiarity spawns comfort.
As my 'Zapology' frame of reference broadened I started to appreciate his Orchestral stuff. About then I realized that Zappa probably had numerous versions jazz, rock, acoustic and Orchestral/symphonic, of everyone of his songs.
I always liked the melody, mockery and whimsical nature of 'Duke of Prunes'
Let us know!