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In the waning minutes before the show, I am surrounded by old guys. The hall is imbued with the stale smell of hastily inhaled gaspers just outside the front entrance and the odors of a settled, banal existence – clean laundry, home cooking, and dust. I am in a sea of gray hair, limp pony tails, flabbiness, and wrinkles. Average age: fifty-five. But beneath it all, you can see the early layers of adolescent sediment: furtive attempts to assume the poses of yesteryear, boys now men cruising around the theatre with their hands in their pockets, looking cool and casual – though now without even trying, scanning surreptitiously for familiar faces, occasionally finding the mark and greeting with exaggerated gestures and smirks, just like back in the day. The guy next to me has seen eight Frank Zappa shows. He now has four grandchildren.
Frank Zappa's eldest son, Dweezil has brought his band to Santa Cruz on the second tour of Zappa Plays Zappa (the first was in 2006). The tour's stated intention is "to bring the music of Frank Zappa to a new generation." Later in the show, Dweezil will ask the audience, "How many of you have never heard my father's music?" and only one hand will rise above the sea of heads in the dim light.
Zappa Senior's music always was a tough sell. Technically complex and esoteric, its appeal is further limited by the bawdy comedies and garish scenery that garnish its presentation. As such it found favor chiefly among teenage boys, drawn by the anti-establishment overtones and "elicit" lyrics that stuck out in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush-scalded landscape of the seventies and eighties. These teenage boys soon discovered, however, that all of the ribaldry was just a sideshow to the technical wizardry conveyed through that perennial object of onanistic adolescent fascination, the electric guitar. Frank Zappa was one of the great guitar innovators, taking standard blues licks and jamming them through Phrygian, Mixolydian, and the other modal keyholes to produce a unique, even confrontational style perfectly complimented by tales of "corporate record executives snorting detergent and plooking each other!" The kids, including myself, ate it up and were deeply grateful to Frank for teaching them things about music that they could use and appreciate, whether or not they played an instrument.
I'm only a little older than Dweezil, and I've never seen his father perform live. By the time I was old enough to go to concerts, Frank had started focusing on orchestral arrangements, the synclavier, serious music, and then came the onset of prostrate cancer that claimed his life in 1993. I started getting into Zappa in high school, joining my buddies down in the basement after school, laughing along with Joe's Garage. What struck me at first about his music was the tightness, the precision and polish. It was the eighties, when any dumb bunch of poseurs with a synthesizer could get on the radio, and most of them did. Sloppiness was the status quo, along with the ridiculous hair and day-glo colors. Frank taught us that good music took hard work, but that hard work paid off.
Gratitude gushes out of the latter day audience as son Dweezil and company take the stage. We're not hear to learn, we've done that; we're not here to relive, we're far too old for that; we're here simply to say thanks. Dweezil graciously receives our offerings, and the band immediately launches into a fast-tempo, riff-laden Purple Lagoon, followed by Imaginary Diseases still following the swift, driving beat that Dweezil will later confess surprises the band itself. Dweezil has clearly mastered his father's technique, and carries off these guitar solos with casual aplomb. Then the show settles into steady, somewhat passive presentation of faves (listed below) until finally reviving for Echidna's Arf and Don't You Ever Wash That Thing? – for me the highlight of the show and where all of the musicians were at peak performance.
We then get dragged through the admittedly tedious (as Dweezil inferred) presentation of Billy Mountain, one of so many "music theatre" pieces, consisting mainly of corny spoken-word story lines and punctuated by musical sound effects, that seem neither to go anywhere nor to have any point. The audience is patient and appreciative (of the difficulty if nothing else), and expresses its gratitude with a standing-o, nonetheless. More album faves follow, only occasionally accentuated by Dweezil's erudite soloing, until finally the band starts to wind down with The Torture Never Stops, which features a very solid bit of fret work by Dweezil again.
Perhaps it's asking too much from the new generation to appreciate music born before apathy embalmed the corpse of political activism in the new world of dirty tricks, October surprises, spin-doctoring and electioneering. Or perhaps now that the Republicans are in retreat we're just over it all. The Torture Never Stops was performed without even the slightest allusion to waterboarding, and during the pregnant pause before the clave, no one in the venue even so much as snickered, though plenty of us had seen the set list (taped to the stage in front of each microphone) and knew what was coming. This is Santa Cruz, where the signs read, "Please Don't Bush Your Dog Here."
If the old political rancor was noticeably absent from the show, maybe for the same reason so was the sense of mourning that pervaded the first Zappa Plays Zappa tour. Nothing like the sentimental favorite, Watermelon in Easter Hay so much as glanced in the general direction of the set list. This time Dweezil would eschew any overt displays of bereavement. Rather, the evening seemed to be devoted to a more technical than cathartic study of the music. Letting the music live, instead of lamenting the loss of its auteur, seemed to carry the day.
Dweezil appears to have emerged from grief and found the next foothold for his career's ascent. His technique and voicing, once hampered by too much Van Halen, have come into their own. For the encore, he once again nailed Peaches En Regalia and Willie The Pimp, two songs from the 1970 album, Hot Rats, the album Frank dedicated to Dweezil, and songs which Dweezil now all but owns outright.
The challenge for Dweezil and the band over the next several months, as the tour traipses the Pacific Rim then Europe, will be preventing the show from getting tired. For if the audiences aren't getting any younger, and neither are the old jokes, and the challenges of learning all the material have abated, this show may have to get by on gratitude alone. I hope not, for there really is so much more there. Dweezil could loosen his own shackles a bit, try some new things with the old material. Yeah, we know Frank, show us a thing or two more about this talented young man and his brilliant band. Already there is evident in his playing an empathy and humanity that seemed to elude the more pedantic proclivities of his father. If you check out Dweezil's last album, Go With What You Know, you can see this. He's got his dad's composing skills, yes, but perhaps his ability to relate takes his music up a notch. For more evidence of this, I watched as Dweezil stayed late after the show, signing autographs, chatting with the faithful, posing for snaps, and smiling through the fatigue.
March 4, 2009, Santa Cruz, CA:
Purple Lagoon
Imaginary Diseases
City of Tiny Lights
Why Dont'cha Do Me Right?
Penguin in Bondage
Wind Up Working in a Gas Station
Village of the Sun
Echidna's Arf
Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?
Billy Mountain
Flakes
Broken Hearts Are for Assholes
Bamboozled By Love
King Kong
Lumpy Gravy
Cletus Awreetus Awrightus
The Torture Never Stops
Peaches En Regalia
Willie the Pimp
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