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Courtesy of CityBeat - Cincinnati's alternative weekly:
Zappa Lives Live
How do you calculate the nine billion names of God? How do you number the stars or the grains of sand on the beach? And how do you quantify the sheer genius of Frank Zappa's music?
Frank himself, the brilliant old curmudgeon, once accurately noted, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” To take that a step further, talking about Frank’s music is like instigating the dialog in an unknown language while dancing about the architecture on another planet.
The musical output of Frank Zappa was challenging and, to a lot of ears, incomprehensible at the time of its creation, beginning over 40 years ago, and a good deal of it remains so today. Frank was a dazzling guitarist of infinite invention, an orchestral conductor with an exacting and unyielding quest for perfection and a frontman of devastating charisma. His complex style, an operating room hybrid of Classical, Jazz, Doo Wop, Rock and anything else that happened to strike his highly-attuned fancy, has eluded mass acceptance for four decades and that trend will likely continue for some time to come. Because Frank chose the Rock idiom primarily to couch his musical ideas, and because those ideas often included the basest kind of scatological humor, he has often been devalued as an important figure, although Classical poobahs are finally coming around to the notion that Frank was one of the greatest contemporary composers of the 20th century. The fact that his most detailed compositions and his simplest songs are still intensely challenging to contemporary ears merely cements their greatness in the minds of most right thinking people.
There were certainly a good number of right-thinking people in attendance at Coney Island’s Moonlight Gardens Tuesday night when Frank’s oldest son Dweezil brought the second edition of his gloriously conceived and executed Zappa Plays Zappa tour to Cincinnati. Sporting a band that was skilled enough to be prized by the old man himself, Dweezil Zappa embarked on an evening dedicated to his father’s almost impossible to replicate catalog of guitar pyrotechnics, Classical bombast, Jazz cool, Rock volume and a variety of perfectly placed honks, gurgles, splats and wheezes, a monumental undertaking which required Dweezil, himself a player of considerable skill, to completely relearn his picking technique in order to recreate Frank’s thrilling lead runs.
Dweezil launched Zappa Plays Zappa last year, setting himself the unenviable task of trying to perform faithful versions of his father’s insanely difficult musical constructions, in order to reward longtime fans (who have sorely missed seeing Frank in the live arena in the wake of his debilitating illness and tragic passing 14 years ago) and to attract new converts among contemporary youth (who just might identify with Frank’s message of cultural alienation and distrust of authority). Both camps were well represented at Moonlight Gardens, as graying old men stood beside vital youth, all of them exultant over the impossible sounds that emanated from the ZPZ band.
Take “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” for instance. The 40-year-old track from the Mothers’ sophomore album, Absolutely Free, is the perfect tutuorial for the Zappa novice. It combines everything that Frank was ultimately noted for, done at a time when no one understood what the hell he was doing in the first place. It is the sound of a gifted garage band doing a combination Wagnerian opera/Classical suite/lounge song/vaudeville skit about a perverse civil servant and the dangers of becoming a “loyal plastic robot for a world that doesn’t care.” Frank’s revolution was not one of political upheaval and violent unrest, but rather the quiet rebellion of rejecting the tainted religious and social values that had hobbled civilization for far too long, in Frank’s estimation.
In their place, Frank proposed a pair of interesting and probably completely unworkable ideals: real freedom and pure truth. Rather than preach about these ideals, Frank merely imagined the outcome of not following their tenets and the resultant cultural mess, which was more or less just reporting the news of the day in his own inimitable fashion.
Dweezil has resurrected this cherished chestnut from Frank’s past and brought it into contemporary focus, not by fiddling with the arrangement or adding his own particular spin on its message but by presenting it exactly as Frank formed it four decades ago. “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” remains relevant today because society has progressed very little from the era that inspired Frank’s initial observations. We are still much too quick to put faith in a government that has shown, time and time again, that it is unworthy of the trust we place in it, and nothing will change until we demand it as an electorate. “Brown Shoes” couldn’t have been a more welcomed or appropriate addition to the ZPZ set list.
For the rest of the three-hour show, Dweezil and his crack band made certain that nearly every phase of his father’s career was touched upon, a Herculean task considering Frank’s 75-album catalog. The most amazing aspect of the presentation was the precision and mastery the ZPZ band brought to Frank’s material, from the astonishing intricacy of “G-Spot Tornado" to the freewheeling “San Ber’dino” to the jaw-dropping jam of “Dupree‘s Paradise” with its sly interludes of “In the Mood” (in tribute to the Glenn Miller heritage of Moonlight Gardens) and Dizzie Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” to the thunderous “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” to the rapturous “Muffin Man.”
The evening’s most special guest was vocalist/guitarist Ray White, a veteran of Frank’s bands in the ’80s, whose voice soared through “City of Tiny Lights,” “Pygmy Twylyte” and the absolutely inspired “Illinois Enema Bandit,” proving conclusively that he has lost none of his vocal or guitar prowess over the past 20 years. White’s presence was more than a celebrity cameo, it was a validation of the ZPZ concept and proof that Frank hired only the best for his bands, an ethic that Dweezil has followed to the letter.
Clearly one of the most stirring moments came when video of Frank popped up on a screen behind drummer/Zappa archivist Joe Travers as the band launched into Apostrophe classic “Cosmik Debris,” with the taped Frank providing lead vocals and guitar and Dweezil peppering in solos. As the band navigated their way through Frank’s version of the Blues, Dweezil couldn’t help but have a look at the screen as he emulated his should-have-been-more-famous father. Although the moment didn’t seem to have an outward effect on Dweezil’s emotions, it certainly moved a good many people who witnessed it from the audience.
No true Frank Zappa fan could have walked away from the Moonlight Gardens unhappy with Dweezil’s presentation of his father’s music, not even the bone spur in the crowd who kept yelling for “Peaches En Regatta,” who was doubly disappointed when they played neither that nor “Peaches En Regalia,” which is what I assumed he actually wanted to hear. Dweezil’s mastery of not only Frank’s technical prowess but his intent was evident throughout the night as he and the impossibly talented ZPZ band charged through one challenging tune after another.
Triumph piled upon triumph, and by the end of the three hour extravaganza, it was clear that the younger Zappa had done his late father a great service in resurrecting his work for his earliest fans as well as his newest accolytes. Here’s hoping that this venture not only inspires Dweezil to amplify his own personal recording career, but that he finds enough success in ZPZ to continue touring on Frank’s extraordinary legacy. Thank God for the house of Zappa … long may it stand.
— Brian Baker
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Had such a great time at Moonlight Gardens, I took my nephew and my 2 kids, Dweezil was kind enough to pose for a picture with us and sign the drumstick my son will build a shrine to, haha.
