Music legend and cultural provocateur Frank Zappa did a good number of interviews with the San Diego Union-Tribune over the years. So has his musician son, Dweezil, who is interviewed in the April 30 Sunday Arts section of the Union-Tribune.

Here are some of Frank Zappa’s more memorable Union-Tribune interview quotes about:

His musical diversity: “Put yourself in my shoes. If I wake up and want to write a cowboy song, I can do it; if I get up the next day and want to write an opera, I can do it; if I want to write a heavy-metal song the day after that, I can do it. The rock stuff is the simplest, because it only requires eight guys. But in the `serious’ music world, where you have to pay for all those members of an orchestra, it requires such massive amounts of money that it’s ridiculous.”

His San Diego teachers: “The music teacher at Grossmont High was a guy named Benton Minor, who signed all his passes ‘B. Minor.’ Robert Kavelman was my music teacher at Mission Bay High. I don’t know if they’re still there, but I’d like to tip my hat to them. Kavelman was the first to introduce me to 12-tone music. They were my teachers in orchestra and marching band. There were no composition classes, because American public schools don’t offer them. So I went to the library, because all of the books that you need to learn the mechanics of music are available there, and they’re free. The rest of my studies involved listening to records and playing in bars.”


The San Diego music scene — “I loved San Diego. I really missed it when I moved away, but now it’s turned into something completely different. If kids going to school there now had any idea just what kind of a colorful and interesting musical life San Diego had back in the mid-'50s, they’d be extremely disappointed that it doesn’t exist there anymore. Each district in town had really hot bands, and it was very competitive.”

Instrumental transitions — “I wasn’t that great a drummer; I didn’t have the coordination to really be that successful. I had more fun with the guitar. My favorite drummer at the time was Louie Bellson. I was amazed at what he did. Then I got into `Philly’ Joe Jones. My three favorite guitarists then were Johnny `Guitar’ Watson, Clarence `Gatemouth’ Brown and Guitar Slim.”

His teen years — “I was a guy with a big nose, overweight and pimples; typical teen-age geek. And (people) could care less if I loved music or did whatever it was. I wasn’t a quarterback, and had no intention of ever becoming one, so who needs this guy? To me, that didn’t make any difference, because I was totally happy working by myself. I’ve never been the kind of guy who needs a whole bunch of friends hanging around.”

Dwindling attention spans — “Very few people listen to music anymore. They either watch music or dance to it, but listening seems old-fashioned. The music listener will eventually go the way of the snail darter, and there won’t be anybody stepping in to save them.”


Music critics — “What somebody writes about what you do is pretty irrelevant. Most of the people who tell other people what to like are pretty ignorant, though it’s through no fault of their own, since most of them are probably graduates of American schools.”

New Age music — “It’s one of those things you get to experience at the dentist. I went to the dentist, he had his radio tuned to `The Wave,’ and it was nauseating me. I couldn’t tolerate it. I went back to the dentist the other day and he had switched back to KJQY (K-JOY), or one of those mondo-elevator-music stations, and I was grateful.”

Jazz — “I think there are kids in this country that have no idea what jazz is. Jazz to them, if it’s ever brought to them through TV, is a guy who’s being presented as a crime character. He’s usually involved in the drug trade, or he’s a down-and-out degenerate, or he’s a weirdo with a beret. Europeans have a different view of jazz, because all the jazz musicians who were abused in the U.S. went to Europe and played their butts off.”

His fans in the 1960s — “Our biggest audience was middle-class Jewish guys from the suburbs. We didn’t have a hippie audience that was eating organic food and discussing the cosmos; they were listening to the Grateful Dead.”


His fans in the 1980s — “A lot of writers think there are all these crusty old denizens of the ‘60s who liked the Mothers and are just waiting to see them again. I don’t think so. Some older fans still buy records, some don’t. It’s not such an important part of their lives anymore. When you were younger, you’d leave album covers lying around on coffee tables to show people how groovy you were. Today, they have other status symbols: lines of coke; a hot tub; and other things that people use to prove how splendid they are.”

Embracing technology as an orchestral composer — “You get a computer. Now I can play and hear anything I want. I just type it in, and it’s always perfect — it doesn’t need a tea break, it’s always on beat, it’s always in pitch. The French have developed a computer called the 4-X system. It processes things in eight nano-seconds (eight one-billionths of a second). It has the equivalent of 1,000 digital oscillators, which means you could program an entire symphony orchestra into it, instrument by instrument, type up every part that was going to be played, and have it come back in a perfect orchestral performance. It makes life a lot easier in terms of not hearing wrong notes or the wrong rhythms. But you have to come up with $100,000 to pay for it, and you have to pay a person to maintain it. It’s not a toy. But at least it’s available. At least somebody in some country took the time to build something like that. What have we done in America? Nothing. The only thing machines do in America is kill.”

The state of the union — “I would say today’s political situation is so abysmal that, well, C-SPAN TV re-ran a speech by Spiro Agnew at the (1968) Republican convention, when he was nominated, and he looked terrific. Agnew looked terrific. Give me a break! What do you do when Agnew looks terrific?”

His political leanings: “I consider myself to be a a full-time, hard-core conservative, which means you want a small government and lower taxes. But, beyond that, I don’t want to know about their (Republican) platform. Because this abortion business, prayers in school and the rest of that — forget it. But I am right there for a smaller government and lower taxes.”


His possible 1992 presidential bid: “My main qualifications are that I don’t play golf, I don’t take vacations and I do think the U.S. constitution is one hell of a document and that this country would work better if people adhered to it more closely,”

His legacy: “Ronald Reagan is the kind of guy who worries about being remembered. And his wife worries even more. And I don’t give a s---. So there you go.”

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george.varga@sduniontribune.com