For his first three years as a superstar, David Bowie found his partner in crime in Mick Ronson.

The guitarist’s expressive playing style never shied away from different sonic territories, lending itself to Bowie’s genre-blending songwriting style on classic early albums including The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973).

It set the stage for the caliber of six-string talent that accompanied Bowie throughout his career.

Adrian Belew was one such talent. On the recommendation of producer extraordinaire Brian Eno, Belew graduated from the Frank Zappa Band right around the time Bowie was looking for a new guitarist.

“We first met when he appeared at a concert in Berlin, when I was playing with Frank Zappa,” recalls Belew in the new issue of Guitar World.

“Two nights before that, Brian Eno had come to the show in Cologne, and Brian knew David was looking for a fresh guitar player, so he told him, ‘We’ve got to go see this guy that’s with Zappa.’”

And, turns out, Zappa’s onstage theatrics helped Belew land his next gig.

“There was a part of the show where Frank took an extended 10-minute solo, leaving just Terry Bozzio (drummer) and Patrick O’Hearn (bassist) on stage, and the rest of us were supposed to walk off the stage at that point.

“As I was doing that, I looked over at the monitor guy, and there was David Bowie and Iggy Pop standing there.”

Belew wasted no time. “I walked over and shook David’s hand and said, ‘I just want to really thank you for all your music.’ I didn’t even have time to say anything to Iggy before David said, ‘Well, good. How’d you like to be in my band?’”

To this day, it remains a standout moment in Belew’s career and still gives him shivers. “Two weeks later, I was in David’s rehearsal.”

Belew ended up serving as Bowie’s lead guitarist on his Low / Heroes World Tour in 1978 – documented on the live album Stage. On the recording front, he lent his chops to his 13th studio album, Lodger – the final release of his Berlin trilogy.

However, his tenure with Bowie didn’t quite end there. 12 years later, he returned as Bowie's musical director on his mammoth Sound+Vision Tour.

“That was a whole other level; it took me months of preparation,” says Belew.

“One of the main difficulties was that he wanted just a four-piece band, and yet he was doing a retrospective of all his career.” Fortunately, this coincided with the arrival of the first-ever sampler on the market, prototypes of which Roland had sent to Belew, making all the instrumental layers possible.

“Me and my engineer and the keyboard player, Rick Fox, sat for hours and tried to sample all this stuff. We kept buying more samplers, so in the end we had two huge racks of samplers!”

For more from Belew, plus interviews with some of Bowie’s other key guitarists, pick up issue 607 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

Giving stupid answers to smart questions, it’s our weekly snarky pseudo-interview… Fret Buzz. This week: Bob Dylan’s guitarists keep going on garden leave. But what makes The Bard a tough gig, and who are rock’s most notorious paymasters?

Dylan’s guitarists are walking out? You just can’t get the staff…

They’re dropping like flies. Last month, long-term sideman Doug Lancio quit the road band, followed a fortnight later by Bob Britt. We wouldn’t like to speculate, but Britt’s farewell post – “Sayanora Bobby” – seemed flippant (at best) or a man bursting with bottled-up venom (at worst).

Yes, I’ve always gone with ‘thanks for the opportunity’. What’s Britt going to do now?

Gardening, apparently. He wrapped up his next post by announcing he was off to weed his flowerbeds.

He’d rather do that than play with Dylan? Next you’ll be telling me Stevie Van Zandt has quit the E Street Band to creosote his fence.

Well, tell that to the 35-plus guitarists who’ve blown through Dylan’s lineup [indeed, Dylan debuted his third new guitarist in three weeks, Jad Tariq just this past weekend – Ed]. The guy gets through sidemen like kamikaze pilots.

But Dylan is the era-defining poet of the rock ’n’ roll epoque. A seminal visionary who…

Yeah, yeah, we know all that. But being his guitarist isn’t necessarily easy.

Isn’t it just G, A minor, C, and A?

In theory (although what you just said is slightly reductive). But Dylan’s freewheeling onstage tendencies can apparently feel like one long hazing ritual.

“I was great friends with the Heartbreakers,” Dave Stewart of Eurythmics once recalled. “They were on tour with him and said he’d suddenly play the song in a different key, or he decides to miss out a verse.”

Heh. What a jokerman. I bet he’s a riot in the studio?

Not according to Robben Ford, who recalled one ’90s session where Dylan arrived in the studio only to slump wordlessly on a stool – “[he] doesn’t say anything, head down, nothing”. Then there’s the relentless death march of his touring schedule.

Don’t people nickname it the Never Ending Tour?

Yep. By the time you finally get home, the babies whose births you missed are arthritic old gargoyles hobbling around looking for their dentures.

Is Dylan the toughest rock icon to work for?

Not by any means. Rock ’n’ roll is full of borderline despots. Take James Brown, who reportedly fined his players for missing a note, or even just wearing the wrong shoes.

Wow. So by the end of Sex Machine, you could owe him $50? Maybe I would be better off as a dog-walker.

That’s nothing. Prince demanded a ‘purple’ lifestyle of his band members.

What does that even mean?

Search me. Lots of beets on the backstage rider?

Maybe he should have just hired Barney the dinosaur.

Then there’s Frank Zappa, whose standards were so absurdly high that you literally had to be Steve Vai.

And what about that poor sessioner that Axl Rose humiliated by making him wear a KFC bucket every night…

No, that was his choice. I mean, the guy’s called Buckethead. He’s kind of painted himself into a corner on that one.

So how do I apply for the Dylan gig?

Just hang around the stage door for the next sessioner to storm out. We’ll have your gardening gloves waiting for you…

If you've never heard Scott Thunes play the bass guitar, you can’t appreciate how far the instrument can be taken. Thunes will dispute that notion, of course – he takes issue with the idea he’s a great bassist.

The former Frank Zappa sideman is a contrarian of the highest order. He disagrees with almost any statement of a declarative nature, at least when it concerns his role in music and his approach to the bass.

Thunes is of the opinion that much of the brilliant live work he recorded with Zappa is riddled with mistakes, each of which he’s apt to point out in detail.

Regardless of whether he concedes that he’s a great bassist, Thunes played an integral role in music that recognised few limitations.

In an interview with Thomas Wictor for his book In Cold Sweat: Interviews With Really Scary Musicians, which also appeared in the March ’97 issue of Bass Player, Thunes revealed the highs and lows of his seven-year tenure with Zappa.

“I’m a good bass player, fine. I’m a great bass player, great,” said Thunes. “Think whatever you want, but it’s unfair I should be given even slight credit for something I don’t feel pushed the boundaries of the instrument.”

Thunes first contacted Frank Zappa in 1981 at the behest of his brother, who had himself tried unsuccessfully to audition for Zappa’s group. Having recorded some tracks in L.A., he was summoned back for the formal audition a week later.

This session included improvising to arrhythmic tracks played on a drum machine, as well as performing the same song with two other auditioning bassists, the three of them competing face-to-face.

Once hired, Thunes played with Zappa up until the group’s notorious 1988 tour, the demise of which he is reputed to have caused.

“Once in Barcelona, someone in the band came up to me and screamed, ‘Don’t you know what a privilege it is to play with Frank? How can you ruin his music?’

“So at that particular moment I put my headphones on, and I started listening to classical music while this guy’s mouth was flapping. It was delicious.”

So what, in particular, caused tension between Thunes and the rest of the band?

“Onstage, stuff was turned into a negative only by those who didn’t want people to step out of their pre-determined roles. I play a lot of lines; I pick chunks out of the air, and instead of playing bass, I play my part in the orchestration. And of course the whole idea of being a bass player is not to overplay.

“But I dig tension in my music. For the people who perform it, music very rarely releases tension; it almost always increases tension, but I know from modern classical music that tension can coexist with normality. Frank was a fan of that.”

Thunes was put in the untenable position that the band wouldn’t tour unless he left. And yet Zappa loved how he played, allowed him the freedom to put his improvisational mark on the music, and even made him a ‘Clonemeister’, which essentially meant he was in charge of band rehearsals in Zappa’s absence.

Thunes offered to leave but Zappa didn’t want to begin the audition process all over again, and this coincided with his decision to quit touring altogether.

“At the end of the ’88 tour, Frank decided he wasn’t going to play anymore, because the rest of the band had told him they wouldn’t go out with me again.

“When he told me that, I said, ‘I’ll gladly quit.’ He said, ‘That’s not the answer. I like you, and I like what you do, except for all the mistakes you’ve been making.’

“Every night onstage, I was surrounded by daggers and would completely lose my concentration. I was a wreck, and the music suffered because of my mistakes. Frank’s only enjoyment was playing guitar solos, and those fell apart.”

“We also ended up not doing any more three-hour soundchecks. We’d play just two songs, and then he’d get out of there. He could not stand being in the same room with us. It was the worst possible combination of events for him.”

For Thunes, the musical experience of a lifetime became forever associated with extreme personal doubt and loneliness. It might have all been different had Thunes played for some less iconic figure, or some minor music star, but this was Frank Zappa, a true 20th-century icon.

Five years later, in December 1993, Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer, closing the door on a unique chapter of musical history.

Ike Willis, Frank Zappa’s longstanding co-guitarist and singer, has died aged 70. The news was shared by his family in a statement to Rolling Stone, who confirmed that the artist passed away in North Las Vegas on May 16.

No specific cause of death was mentioned, but in 2021, Willis publicly revealed that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

“Ike was not only a great father, but a musician whose unmistakable voice, humor, and artistry left a lasting imprint on the music world,” reads the statement.

“His years of collaboration with Frank Zappa made him a cherished figure within the Zappa community, where fans embraced him not only for his talent, but for his generosity, wit, and the joy he brought to every stage.

“Beyond his work with Zappa, Ike continued to inspire new generations of musicians. His time mentoring young artists – including his stint teaching at School of Rock – reflected his deep belief that music should be shared, taught, and passed forward with love.”

Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Willis started playing guitar at the age of eight, and, as a teenager, was obsessed with all things prog and jazz fusion.

Willis first connected with Zappa while he was studying political science at Washington University, after they ended up meeting backstage at one of Zappa’s concerts.

Speaking about this encounter, Willis told Andrew Greenaway for the book, Frank Talk: The Inside Stories Of Zappa's Other People, “Frank takes me to his dressing room, hands me his guitar and says, ‘Do you know any of my shit?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Well, play me something.’”

Willis passed his impromptu audition, and after a successful formal audition in California later on in the year, he was officially part of the Zappa circus from 1978 until his last tour in 1988.

His first major project with Zappa was the ambitious rock opera and triple album, Joe’s Garage, released in 1979, where he voiced the eponymous character, Joe.

Beyond Joe’s Garage, Willis was a constant in Zappa’s circle – especially considering the rotating roster of musicians – appearing in Tinsel Town Rebellion, The Man From Utopia, Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar, as well as Zappa’s off-Broadway-styled conceptual musical Thing-Fish.

Willis also had other projects, including his own outfit, the Ike Willis Band, which released Should’a Gone Before I Left in 1987, followed by Dirty Picture in 1998. However, since Zappa’s death in 1993, Willis was primarily involved in various tribute projects.

“I know that on any given night, we could be somebody’s first exposure to this music. I don’t take that responsibility lightly,” Willis told JamBase in a 2018 interview, when reflecting on his career and involvement in Zappa tribute gigs.

“Because there is always going to be somebody out there who is experiencing Frank’s music for the first time, and there are going to be people. Some of them bring their kids or their grandkids, it always happens.”

Where demand for pedal effects grew exponentially during the early ’70s as musicians sought new sounds, many stompbox designers turned to the synthesizer for new inspiration.

Mike Beigel was among the earliest engineers who realized that synth modules could easily be adapted into standalone effects. Although Guild hired Beigel to develop a synthesizer in the early ’70s, the project got canned, which inspired Beigel and former Guild chief electronics engineer Aaron Newman to form their own effects company, Musitronics, in 1972.

Beigel and Newman developed the prototype for their first product, an envelope filter called the Mu-Tron III, during the summer of 1972, and it became an overnight sensation when Stevie Wonder used the effect for his supremely funky Clavinet riff on the hit Higher Ground released in mid-1973.

The circuit consists of an envelope follower that uses optocouplers to control a voltage controlled filter. The optocouplers respond to input signal playing dynamics to sweep the EQ filter, resulting in a funky wah sound that is exceptionally expressive and responsive.

The wah sounds go well beyond those of a typical wah pedal, producing a wide variety of textures that include duck-like quacks, vowel-like vocal tones, piercing synth squeals and bowel-shaking bow wows.

Controls on the Mu-Tron III include a Mode switch with low-pass, band-pass and high-pass filter settings, a Peak (Q) knob for adjusting the resonant peak, a Gain knob and low/high Range and down/up Drive rocker switches.

Most guitarists prefer the fatter, thicker sound of the low-pass setting, which provides full bass and rolls off harsh treble frequencies. The early versions run on either two 9-volt batteries or an 18-volt power supply, while late-’70s versions (when Musitronics was owned by Arp) have a built-in power supply.

“We used a dual supply instead of a single supply so the effect could have a wide dynamic range,” Beigel said. “That way you could really smash on the guitar and not distort the whole effect.”

When combined with other effects like distortion, phase shift/flanging and pitch shifting, the Mu-Tron III can generate some dazzling, unusual sounds. Because the effect is dynamically responsive, it should be placed at the front of the signal chain and effects like compression and distortion should be plugged in after it.

Although the Mu-Tron III’s sounds are undeniably funky, and the pedal made a strong impression in the hands of funk musicians like keyboardists Stevie Wonder and George Duke and bassist Bootsy Collins, most of the guitarists known for using one hail from genres other than funk. Psychedelic jazz fusion guitarist Larry Coryell was an early adopter during the ’70s, as were Jerry Garcia and Frank Zappa.

Andy Summers and Steve Vai (taking a cue from his mentor Frank Zappa) employed a Mu-Tron III frequently during the ’80s and ’90s, and more recent, users include Trey Anastasio, Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo), Larry LaLonde, and Peter Frampton, who expertly summoned vocal-like textures from his Mu-Tron III on his 2006 cover of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Mike Keneally has looked back on the time he scored the Frank Zappa gig – after cold-calling his guitar hero and impressing him with a photographic-like memory of his musical catalog.

Keneally was unknown to Zappa when he called his office out of the blue in an attempt wrangle an audition. But when he said he had a “Zappa jukebox” in his head, the man himself knew it had to be seen to be believed.

The revered session ace joined Zappa’s band in 1988, and he turned out to be tailor-made for the gig. He was a Zappa fanatic. Zappa’s melodies were etched deep into his brain, and he was eager to prove it.

“I was really passionate about his music when I was a kid, and being mostly self-taught, I developed my ears more than my eyes,” Keneally tells Guitar World. “So, I had what I basically would refer to as a 'Zappa jukebox' in my brain.

“If somebody mentioned a Zappa tune, I would say, ‘Give me a second.’ And I'd push the button for that song in my head and then just kind of play along with it,” he expands.”

This particular spot was his dream gig. So, what did Keneally do? He took action. He called up Zappa HQ asking for a job.

“I called his office and said, 'Hey, I don't know if Frank's looking for anybody, but I play guitar and keyboard and I sing, and I'm familiar with all of Frank's work, and if he needs anyone, I'm right here,'” Keneally admits.

Zappa called his bluff and invited him for an audition, just to see how familiar Keneally actually was with his material. The years of practice paid off.

“That's what served me well in the audition for Frank,” Keneally continues of his Zappa jukebox. “He had heard from the guy that I called in his office when I called up to ask for a job that I was familiar with all of his music, and he didn't believe it.”

In 1984, Zappa had sworn never to tour again, as his tours were proving financially unviable. So, when he announced he was putting a new band together in 1987, Keneally made his play.

“There was a certain amount of fate involved, and a certain amount of desperation in Frank returning my call and saying, ‘Is this true? I don't believe you, but get over here and prove it,’” Keneally believes.

He says he was “terrified on the drive to the audition.” His brother was behind the wheel, and Keneally was sitting in the back, practicing every single Zappa song he could think of.

“I was panicking, and my brother, in a show of extreme wisdom and kindness, pulled off the freeway so he could stop the car, turn around, look me in the eye, and say, ‘You're never going to be more ready for this than you are right now.’”

The audition songs were Sinister Footwear, a song he knew well, and What's New in Baltimore?, which he scrambled together in 24 hours – it was a rare glitch in his jukebox.

When bass player Scott Thunes laughed in delight at his chops, he knew his dream gig was within reach. He was hired.

Keneally once said his mind was blown daily working with Frank, and last year, he gave Guitar World readers a wicked insight into his ability to memorize songs.

Frank Zappa’s storied ‘Baby Snakes’ SG is headed to auction for the first time, more than 50 years after he bought it off a budding luthier backstage in Phoenix.

The once-damaged SG copy was revived and Frankenstein'd by 19-year-old Bart Nagel, a student at Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, before it was sold to Zappa in July 1974. Before the sale, Nagel replaced its neck for a three-piece mahogany construction, capped it with a 23-fret ebony fingerboard – an upgrade from the 22-fret original – and gave its body some elegant inlays and detailing.

Zappa then handed it to another luthier, Rex Bogue for electronic modifications. Those included a custom onboard preamp with an 18dB boost and phase-switching, and tone-shaping circuitry, resulting in a smorgasbord of on-body controls that play into Zappa’s chameleon-like employment of his electric guitars.

The SG featured regularly on stage and in the studio. It can be seen and heard during his appearance on The Mike Douglas Show in 1976, where he performed Black Napkins, as well as on his Halloween 77 show, the 1979 Baby Snakes film, and its 1983 soundtrack.

It is still in great condition and Heritage Auctions is expecting it to sell for around $500,000. Bids will start at $300K.

“Hitting the market for the very first time, the ‘Baby Snakes’ SG is a true artifact of musical genius,” says Aaron Piscopo, Heritage's Director of Vintage Guitars & Musical Instruments. “This guitar embodies the boundless intelligence, innovation, and creativity that defined Zappa’s career.”

Heritage's latest auction will also see the sale of 'Pattie', a 1913 Gibson Style O archtop acoustic guitar owned by Eric Clapton and George Harrison. Steve Vai’s Alcatrazz and David Lee Roth-era Jackson SL Series Soloist, built and presented to Vai by Grover Jackson himself, is also included in the lot.

The auction is set to take place on December 5. Head to Heritage Auctions for more.

Now the hysteria surrounding King Crimson offshoot Beat is dying down, Adrian Belew knows what’s next. “I want to get back to angry guitar and also fretless guitar,” he says.

It couldn’t be a better time for the Zappa, Bowie, and Fripp alum to revisit those styles – he’s just had carpal tunnel surgery and reports he’s recovering well. “The speed I’m playing at is as good as ever,” he says of his left hand’s progress.

“With some things, I had to practice hard to get back up to speed,” he explains. “The thing about being older is keeping yourself in shape and keeping yourself creative. I’ll keep making new records – making music is the most important thing to me. The performance is just the second half.”

What’s the prognosis for your left hand?

“It was an easy recovery and an easy operation; no problem at all. While recovering you can’t do much with it and it’s a little tender. Then you finally work back up to tempo. I’m playing as I always did – except there’s no more pain.”

What exactly had been going on?

“My hand started getting numb, and during part of the Beat tour it would stay numb from the moment I woke up until sometime during soundcheck. It was a little scary. I’d be like, ‘You better wake up soon here, hand!’”

Was there a moment you feared that you might not play again, or it might impact your playing forever?

“Yes – but also, not really. Steve Vai was able to walk me through the process since he’s had it done twice. He assured me it was a simple operation and it wasn’t going to go wrong. And he introduced me to one of the best surgeons in the US.

“Dr Azari is so good at what he does. He was one of the first surgeons who did a hand transplant successfully. So, carpal tunnel, for him, is like changing strings! I was actually going to ask him to put on a second left arm, to see what I could do with three hands on the guitar!”

Have you needed to circumvent the impact of age on your playing?

“The truth is I’ve never worked on the basis of notes, speeds, scales, and all that stuff. The physical aspect of it was never as important to me as the mental aspect. I imagined making the guitar do more than just what it does.

“A lot of guitar players just want to be like their heroes; but as you get older that gets harder and harder. But I can still get the sounds I’ve always gotten, so it’s not harder – there’s just more of them!”

You and Steve Vai both have histories with Fank Zappa. Has that helped you forge a working relationship together?

“The year I spent with Frank was the first and only time I’ve ever had serious instruction. Frank was a great teacher and very generous to me. He taught me a lot of things about music and the business of music. It wasn’t just how to play odd time signatures or do wild stuff, but how to behave and have a life as a professional. All those things were unknown to me.

“Steve and I agree that when you go through what Frank teaches you, you come out as a high-quality professional. You know you’ve got to play things consistently and correctly and that you can’t mess around. The main thing Frank wanted from you was to show up at every gig in perfect shape and do the music correctly.”

Without that Zappa training, could you have handled working with David Bowie thereafter?

“It would have been harder to some degree, but I think that music could have been done. But then you move forward a year or two, and I’m in King Crimson, where it’s all about playing in one time signature, and singing in another.

“I would have had a much more difficult time with that if I hadn’t worked with Frank. By the time I came out of that I was very comfortable with odd time signatures – I could write in seven, five, nine, or whatever was required. I understood it from a different basis than some people might have.”

What was Frank’s explanation of odd time signatures?

“It was that you felt the accents. If it’s a seven, that’s what you’re feeling. You’re not counting seven – that would be ridiculous. I’d been a drummer since I was 10, so once I understood that it rang a bell: ‘All I have to do is learn what those accents are, and then I can play in 15.’ I’ve been doing it ever since. Without Frank I would have just been guessing.”

Did that idiosyncratic thinking makes you appealing to Talking Heads?

“Absolutely. They needed someone to throw a lot of color on the painting, and someone who could break loose and do wild soloing. Those things were the perfect additions to their music, but they couldn’t do them. They were really nice to me; they loved what I did and were very supportive.”

Have you ever wondered how an off-the-beaten-track player like you keeps finding himself at the center of pop culture moments?

“I don’t know… You think of people like David Bowie, innovators, and I think I belong in that club. I certainly don’t belong in the club that's doing sessions every day, or the club that’s shredding, or any other club!

“But club I do belong to is the one where you do interesting things that no one else has done. As I said, I always wanted to express sounds with the guitar, more than just knowing how to play the notes. I guess that's how I’ve moved from one thing to another so quickly.”

What are some of your favorite off-kilter guitar sounds?

“The first one that comes to mind is a piece I wrote for my second solo record, Twang Bar King, called Ballet for a Blue Whale. I wanted to make the guitar sound like it was an actual whale. An expert informed me that it’s not the sound of a blue whale – it’s the sound of a humpback whale! But ‘blue whale’ sounds more artistic! Figuring out how to do that was a tremendous thing.

“You have to play through a synthesizer. Then I put it through a delay with an expression pedal. Then I made it so you weren’t hearing the original note – just the note that was being bent by the expression pedal. It could go all over the place. It was fascinating to hear and do that.

“Many times when I’m doing something it just catches my ear, and that takes me in a new direction which leads to new music and songs. Like, if you don’t have the tight, fuzzy sound on the song Big Electric Cat, you’ll never come up with the song Big Electric Cat!”

What pedal did you use for that?

“That’s a Foxx Tone Machine, a pretty underrated ’60s pedal that I found in a pile in a music store. Once I realized what it could do I did so many things with it.”

What’s the most interesting pedal you’re currently using?

“On stage with Beat I play an Electro-Harmonix Echo Flanger. Not many people realize this, but with the five-way mode selector switch you can catch it between two modes. If you do that with the feedback turned all the way up, you can get all kinds of crazy sounds.

“You can make it sound like big, flying metal insects, or make it so that it slows things down. It’s just a monster thing – but it really wasn’t supposed to be that. It was accidental, so thanks for the accidents!”

What sounds are you looking to mess with next?

“I think I’d like to do some tricky stuff with delays and pitches. I wrote a piece a long time ago called Variations of Wave Pressure in which I could play one note, get another note in harmony and a bass note as well.

“You can come up with some really interesting things if you do that. And you’re actually not playing much if you take away the effects – you can’t play a lot because it’ll be too busy. You’re making sure the notes fit properly, which can be really great.”

• Beat will release Beat Live on September 26.

Adrian Belew is currently touring alongside fellow electric guitar behemoth Steve Vai – as well as bass and drums extraordinaires Tony Levin and Danny Carey – under the moniker BEAT to celebrate his King Crimson catalog.

However, one of his earliest gigs was with Frank Zappa. In a story for the ages, the avant-garde musician discovered him in 1977, while Belew was playing with Sweetheart at Fanny's Bar in Nashville. What would transpire was a year that Belew has often described as a “crash course” in music theory – and to an extent, in life.

“The year that I spent with Frank was the first and only time that I’ve ever had serious instruction,” Belew tells Guitar World as he reflects on that game-changing year. “Frank was a great teacher and very generous to me. He taught me a lot of things about many different things to do with music and the business of music.”

Belew clarifies that it wasn't just about playing odd time signatures, or doing “the wild stuff within his [Zappa’s] music”.

Rather, it was a full crash course in music business – specifically, “How to behave and have a life as a professional touring musician and recording artist who goes around the world. All of those things were absolutely unknown to me.”

Playing alongside Vai, who also went through what we might call the Zappa School of Music, Belew noticed some throughlines in their approach to both music and the business.

“I think that both Steve and I agree that when you go through what Frank teaches you, you come out the other end and are truly a high-quality professional,” he reflects.

“You know that you’ve got to play things consistently and correctly, and that you can’t mess around. The main thing that Frank wanted from you was to show up at every gig in perfect shape and do the music correctly.”

In more recent Belew news, the legendary guitarist shared his carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosis and how he's recovering post-surgery.

Channelling punk, jazz and classical influences, Scott Thunes is an enigma of modern bass-playing history and blazed a unique trail in creating his own spiky playing style. Yet his cult status is based on his controversial tenure with Frank Zappa, which ended with him quitting music altogether.

Thunes (pronounced Too-nis) had proclaimed his unequivocal retirement from the music industry in an infamous 1997 interview with writer Thomas Wictor in his book In Cold Sweat: Interviews With Really Scary Musicians, and was working as a doorman at the time, stating: “If I’ve already played with Frank Zappa, where else is there to go?”

Thunes toured and recorded with Zappa until 1988. He also recorded several albums with Dweezil Zappa, toured briefly with guitarist Steve Vai, and recorded and toured with the punk band Fear.

In between construction jobs, temp work, and various local gigs in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, he also recorded with the Waterboys, Andy Prieboy, Wayne Kramer, Mike Keneally, and the Vandals.

“Frank was a special case,” Thunes told Bass Player. “But he wanted all the juice with none of the blood. All of those albums I played on have blood on every track; there was danger lurking behind every single note. I dig tension in my music, because I know from modern classical music that tension can coexist with normalcy. Frank was a big fan of that.”

It’s this hybrid approach, which borrows improvisational ideas from jazz yet filters them through his immense classical knowledge only to be delivered with a punkish picking style on a low-slung P-Bass, that makes Thunes such an innovative stylist. But for all his ability, he remains scathing about the idea of the bass guitar as a solo instrument.

“I hate bass solos. Hearing massively complicated genius bass players solo is one of the most boring things I’ve ever heard in my life. Stu Hamm playing the Moonlight Sonata? It's an ugly sound – don't do it! Step away from the bass! I didn’t take solos with Frank. I just think they sound terrible.”

Rock musicians also get short shrift from Thunes, with many afraid of “knowing too much” and somehow through that then losing their ability to write songs.

“They learn the minor scale, or the pentatonic scale, and everything they do is in there. Even if you change keys you’re going to be playing that same scale over the other chords, or you are going to be playing the appropriate scale over the appropriate chord. Both of them are dead ends, they don’t do anything for you.”

“But bass players aren't supposed to have ideas; they're supposed to be functionaries. If you're a bass player in a rock band, you are by definition a moron – because you are doing nothing except what the song requires.”

Thunes is also of the opinion that much of the brilliant live work he recorded with Zappa is riddled with mistakes, each of which he’s apt to point out in detail.

“When I first started playing with him, Arthur Barrow, the bass player, said for The Torture Never Stops, ‘During his solo Frank doesn’t want to hear anything except the note A. You can play any octave you want but that’s the only note you’re allowed to play.’ In ’81 and ’82 I agreed, but in ’84 I forgot all about it and Frank never actually said, ‘What are you doing to my solo!’”

“In the old days I was able to do whatever I wanted and Frank didn’t say a word. I didn’t need to worry about whether I was being supported or supporting. So even though I’m playing this heavy-duty thick bassline, it’s not Frank’s bassline anymore, it’s mine to do what I want with.

“But everything has its place and has its time, and now that I’m older, playing certain types of music, with certain people I’m now battling within myself: ‘Am I playing too much right now? Let’s play less and see what happens.’ You have to make your own decisions, but it’s my job to find out what’s the most appropriate.”

The ongoing BEAT tour has been a true manifestation of the crème de la crème of prog-rock. With former King Crimson members on guitar and bass – Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, respectively – alongside the inimitable Steve Vai and Tool drummer Danny Carey, it's safe to say that it's been a victory tour for the whole genre.

Belew's contribution cannot be understated – and as a guitarist who, like Belew, was once part of the Frank Zappa camp, Vai tells MusicRadar that he “can't say enough about Adrian” and his distinct guitar work.

“I knew about his work with Zappa, but that didn’t show me all of his brilliance. You need to hear him flexing his muscles in different situations to discover the breadth of the man’s abilities. There are his contributions to David Bowie and Talking Heads, but what he did on those ’80s King Crimson records was monumental.”

Having two guitar virtuosos team up as part of a supergroup can either lead to one outshining the other or a scrumptious feast for the ears. Thankfully, for the BEAT tour, it's the latter. “Together we’ve merged our sounds in a way that creates a really dynamic show,” describes Vai.

“I would say Adrian is underrated in the echelons of guitar,” he asserts. “Nobody plays like anybody else, nobody can play like me, but they can get sort of close. Honestly, there’s no one close to Adrian.

“There’s a special way he’s crafted his own dimension of sounds. To see him play this complex polymetric music while singing at 75 is unbelievable. He still hits the notes with that silky voice. He’ll talk and joke around while I have to keep my head down. The man is a marvel!”

While the first run of the BEAT tour took place last year, the next batch of shows is set to kick off in April in South America.

Through various stints with power pop outfits The Raisins, The Bears and psychodots, Rob Fetters – who has also navigated a successful solo career – has crossed paths with a number of A-list electric guitar heroes.

Some of his closest confidants, including Adrian Belew – with whom he formed The Bears in the mid 1980s – came as a natural side effect of swimming in similar sonic circles. Other interactions, such as the time he first met Frank Zappa, occurred completely by random.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Fetters looks back on his relationship with Belew, and recalls the time he managed to meet one of his heroes after the soon-to-be King Crimson guitarist successfully auditioned to join Zappa’s band.

It wasn’t your average meeting, though. Instead, it proved to be far more memorable.

“The thing that really sealed the bond between Adrian and me was when he auditioned and got the gig with Frank,” Fetters says. “I was in LA for a week. I called my manager, and he told me that Adrian was out here rehearsing.

“I said, ‘What’s Adrian doing out here?’ He said, ‘He’s rehearsing with Frank Zappa.’” he continues. “I was a fan of Frank Zappa, so I called Adrian. He had me pick him up in a borrowed, beat-up, green Ford Falcon station wagon, and we went to the Warner Brothers lot where the band was rehearsing.

“It was a great band, and I thought, ‘Oh, man, what a fantastic version of Frank Zappa’s band.’ I watched them play and was going to give Adrian a ride back to the little apartment he was renting, and Frank stuck his head out and said, ‘Hey, can you give me a ride home?’”

Frank Zappa asking for a lift home wouldn’t have been an every-day occurrence, and Fetters was all too aware of this. As such, he did what any Zappa fan would have done in his situation: he invited Zappa into his car.

“Next thing I know, I’m driving Frank Zappa home to Laurel Canyon! He’s in the backseat, Adrian’s in the front, and we’re pushing paper bags and empty beer cans around and out of the way for Frank to sit.

“I drove him back, and he invited us up to have enchiladas and coffee – but I was too nervous to eat, though I did drink coffee. It was an idyllic week for me.”

As far as first meets go, giving Frank Zappa a lift home after rehearsals wouldn’t have been half-bad.

The full interview with Rob Fetters will be published in the coming weeks.

On June 15, 1978, Arthur Barrow underwent the audition for which he'd spent his whole life preparing. The North Texas State graduate had been given only two days to transcribe and perform a notoriously difficult unison line, one that no bassist had ever executed. But if anyone got a kick out of asking his musicians to do the impossible, it was Frank Zappa.

Barrow passed the audition and achieved one of the main goals he'd set for himself when moving to Los Angeles in 1975. In the process, he sparked a classic rearrangement of one of the maestro's signature compositions, St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast from 1974s Apostrophe. It stands as one of the most terrifying unison lines ever performed by a bassist of any era, period.

“Frank asked me to transcribe the melody after I told him I'd learned Inca Roads by ear,” Barrow told Bass Player. “I can't say whether Frank was looking for someone who could do that, or maybe it was a challenge to see if I was bluffing!

“He would often adapt an arrangement to the abilities of the musicians in the band. The recorded versions were just snapshots of the way the songs were arranged at that time, but each song was constantly evolving, before and after they were released to the public.”

The new arrangement was immortalised by Zappa's 1978 touring band – which included a young Vinnie Colaiuta on drums – on the album You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, Volume 1 as a part of the track Don't Eat the Yellow Snow. This rendition of St. Alfonzo's is faster than the original. It sounds almost atonal, with unusual interval jumps and a shape-shifting dissonance throughout.

But Barrow found some methodology to the madness. “If you look at the melody in small groups, say four to eight notes, you can almost always find a tonal center. It starts in B, Lydian. Then in the last six notes of bar 2, Zappa uses half-steps and 4ths as leading tones through a Bach-like diminished transition.

“The first eight notes of bar 3 are Db Lydian, or you can think of it as F natural minor. The last eight notes are in F major, and so on. If you can't make sense of it, then you just have to think in terms of patterns of intervals.”

There are several spots to watch out for: beats three and four of bar 3 (a double jump up), beat three of bar 4 (an open string followed by a big jump down), the middle of bar 5 (climbing up the D string), the first two beats of bar 6 (descending on the G string), and finally, one last open-string jump (bar 7, beat three) before you stay in 1st position for some crazy interval jumping.

Barrow's tips: start slow, be precise, and use the same fingerings every time before speeding it up. “Frank pushed his musicians as far as he could with musical challenges, so I found myself doing things that I never thought I could have done.

“It may have helped that I was playing a Gibson Ripper, which allowed me to use a pretty light touch. Having said all that, I also practiced a lot!”

Barrow summed it up with a little advice: “Practice your technique at home, but when you play for real, play with the abandon of a child who's picking up the bass guitar for the first time!”

Jimmy Haslip, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and guitarist Robben Ford are studio-savvy musicians whose musical connections date back to the 1970s. Back in 2001, they decided to record as a trio for the first time. In only three days of basic tracking they put together a set of 10 eclectic tunes that featured eye-popping musicianship and, particularly in Haslip's bass parts, lots of space.

“We wrote the songs with space in mind, actually,” said Haslip, who produced Jing Chi. “I like to open up spaces to allow other instruments to speak melodically or rhythmically. Thinking in these terms provides plenty of room to have a musical conversation – in other words, it leaves room for each musician to make a statement. This is a prime rule in playing successfully within an ensemble.”

Haslip is a lefty who plays a left-handed 6-string bass guitar with the strings reversed – his low B string is where the high C is normally located and vice-versa. On all of the Jing Chi tracks he played his old pre-Gibson Tobias, a prototype of sorts for the Tobias Killer B, which Haslip helped design. He changed basses only once, pulling out a Roscoe 6 for the Go Figure bass solo.

Haslip split his signal and went into two Dis: a stock Cabletech direct box and a Westlink DI. He recorded the Cabletech signal direct to Pro Tools, while the Westlink's signal went to an SWR Super Redhead amp with the tweeter turned all the way down, which was mic'd in a studio closet.

Back in June 2002, Jimmy Haslip offered up a track-by-track tour of the album.

1. The Hong Kong Incident

“This was a first take. The unison lines Robben and I play in the A sections create a lot of energy as well as tension. Then it opens up for the solo section, which we built primarily on my bassline.

“I've always been inspired by Larry Graham; that octave figure I play (at 1:46) constituted a form for Robben to solo over and Vinnie to play off of. We opened up the outro vamp and set it up for Vinnie to improvise until we dynamically bring down the music for a spacious, trippy ending.”

2. Stan Key

“A funky little tune that started with a loop and sequence Vinnie had in his computer. He had an interesting idea to record some tweaked snare drumming, and we added that on the end, which gave the song an interesting fadeout.

“At first I didn't have a good handle on what to play, but eventually I came up with a line based on an arpeggiated-picking, almost folk-guitar technique I use: I pick the lower notes with my index and middle fingers, and I use my thumb to pop high notes. I use that for much of the tune's groove section.”

3. Tengoku

“We improvised the intro, which sets up the unusual progression that's built on an Oriental-sounding scale. Again, we opened up everything with a jam on my bassline. It's all in 4/4, but it's rhythmically altered.

“My muting technique involves my fretting hand; in my case it's my right hand. When I'm muting like this I use only my index finger to fret the notes. Plucking the strings aggressively results in an intense thumping sound, like tuned bass drums. I can also mute the strings to the extreme to create dead notes whose sole purpose is to reinforce a rhythmic drum pattern.”

“We decided it got kind of redundant for me to start out with that bass figure and play it for the whole song. I ended up messing with it throughout the tune until the end, when I finally get to the original bass figure I wrote (at 7:40).

“We recorded the tune in one take. The form was basically improvised, and we cued each other visually. It was an experiment, but we like the way it worked.”

4. Crazy House

“This bassline was inspired by my listening to James Brown for many years. A lot of my roots are in R&B, and that comes out from time to time in a song like Crazy House, which sounds almost like an old Bar-Kays groove.

“This jam happened out of the blue after a short discussion about an idea and a form. We liked it so much that we just kept it intact. Vinnie and I added some samples that gave the simple jam session a nice dimension.”

5. Going Nowhere 

“Robben wrote this one, so I played what he wrote pretty much verbatim. I wanted it to sound more synth-like, so I used muting. I also mixed the bass a little hotter than usual; I wanted to accentuate the instrument's percussive nature to bring out the synth-like quality.

“Playing-wise, I was inspired by Jack Bruce's early work with Cream. I like the simplicity of the progression and the groove, and I also like Robben's positive, colorful imagery in the lyric.”

6. Go Figure

“During a jam Robben started playing this chordal pattern; it sounded familiar, but we weren't sure what it was. Than it hit us – it was the Goldfinger theme!

“This tune has my only solo on the record. I actually wasn't thinking of taking any solos on this recording; I just wanted to establish a strong groove, as I feel comfortable in that role and don't feel the need to solo on everything.

“I wanted a slightly different sound for the solo, so I chose my Roscoe 6-string. The Roscoe has a baritone-guitar-like sound, and I thought it would make for a nice change of pace. Plus, I've been playing that bass on most of my live gigs and thought it would be the most comfortable to use as a solo instrument. I thought of using a fretless, but I chose to stay with the fretted sound.”

7. Man in the Ring

“This song reminds me of a unique interpretation of the ZZ Top sound. We were jamming and Vinnie was playing a hip groove in seven, and I joined in and found this little bassline that repeats.

“This tune was hard to feel; I wanted to play something solid, so that if Vinnie started displacing eighth-notes – which he does regularly – I could hold everything down and not lose the pocket. That got pretty hairy during Robben's solo. At one point I really didn't know where one was, but I was totally focused on what I was playing. I knew where I was and trusted Vinnie to know where one was, and fortunately it worked out.”

8. In My Dream

“This ambient piece was inspired by many hours of listening to Radiohead. You can hear a slightly different bass sound on this track: I wrote the tune on my Akai MPC 2000 home workstation and then transferred the tracks to Pro Tools. But I wanted to emulate the synth-bass sound from the demo, so I played my MTD 6 again with a muted technique.

“We kept the original synth bass during the mix, but I featured the electric bass with the synth sound just shadowing the line. We also used a bit more compression on the bass to make it pop out.

“For the bridge I got the swells on the long, sustained notes with a volume pedal, and I overdubbed some picked notes as well. On the fade/vamp I play the bassline an octave lower than the synth to give the ending some serious girth.”

9. Train Song

“I came up with a slightly altered I-IV-V blues. I wanted it to be like a Cream tune, but then Robben wanted to put on some Spanish guitar, so it became more of a flamenco Cream song! I play just a simple blues-rock bass part. Our engineer, Rich Breen, treated the acoustic guitar with reverse delays, which created an unusual environment for the melody sections.”

10. Aurora

“Vinnie came up with this one, which has a serious Led-Zeppelin-meets-Frank-Zappa unison riff up front. The body of the tune kind of reminded me of Nirvana, so I tried to imagine what Krist Novoselic might play.

“Vinnie thought he could build a solo around the unison figure at the end, so we constructed a form for him to blow over. I thought it would make for a powerful, surprise ending to an eclectic body of work. If you listen closely, you can hear Vinnie's reaction.”

Dweezil Zappa – Frank Zappa's son – enjoyed a decades-long friendship with Eddie Van Halen. At the age of 12, he was even gifted Van Halen's 1982 Kramer guitar, which he used to play Runnin’ with the Devil with his band at a school talent show.

However, in a recent interview, he revealed how Van Halen was in awe of Frank Zappa's complex compositions and the younger Zappa's ability to execute them on guitar.

“Having worked with Edward Van Halen on the very first recording that I ever did when I was 12 years old, and then remaining friends with him over the years, until there was this really interesting, fun experience where he came to one of my shows back in 2010, and we were playing the song, St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast [from 1974's Apostrophe (')],” recounts Zappa in an interview with 100 FM The Pike.

“But after the show, he came up [and] he said, ‘What's that pancake song? What are you playing there?’ and I had to play this really difficult part [and] show it to him on the guitar.

“And he was, ‘I don't even understand how you're playing. I can never play that.’ So in that moment, it was a total role reversal. Because me, as a 12-year-old, I was saying, ‘Play Eruption, play Mean Street,’ thinking I could never play that. So I had this complete oddball experience in that moment, it was like the Jedi mind trick or something. It was very strange.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Zappa talks about the most important lesson he learned from his dad. “It was really because he loved the creative journey. And he did what he did, because he loved it. If other people liked it, that was a bonus,” he says.

“So understanding that you could follow a passion and get something out of it, even if it's not related to a monetary reward, it really sets your mind at ease, because you're able to understand what is the important element of it. And if you enjoy that process of constantly being a student of something and learning new things, then you can keep yourself entertained and occupied.”

Dweezil kicks off the The Rox(Postroph)y Tour today in Pheonix, Arizona. The tour celebrates Frank Zappa's legacy, with a special focus on the Roxy & Elsewhere and Apostrophe albums, both released in 1974.

Since brothers Howard and Ron Albert transformed their Criteria Studios in Miami from a one-room recording booth into a premier destination for big artists, they’ve accumulated 40 gold and 30 platinum records.

Or so Howard reckons. Their resume includes Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers, Frank Zappa and more, which means he's probably right.

While their innovative multi-mic recording technique built their reputation, Ron says that’s not the only thing that made Criteria Studios special.

“What made it great was that we had several rooms,” he tells Guitar World. “We had a lot of camaraderie between acts.

“Someone was in one room and they’d come into the next studio, sit in on something, maybe help to do a guitar part. It would happen on so many records. Because of that, I couldn’t begin to tell you who played on what!”

While the Albert Brothers rubbed elbows with Eric Clapton and Joe Walsh, the best of their work probably came via Dickey Betts and Duane Allman, resulting in records like Eat a Peach – which Ron holds dear.

“That was finished after Duane died,” he says. “Though he played on some of the tracks, Dickey went and learned the slide part for Melissa. Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, this is Duane.’ But Duane wasn’t there; it’s Dickey Betts.”

The Albert Brothers sold Criteria Studios in 1983 and retired; but in 1987 they formed Vision Studios and Audio Vision Studios, which today focus on hip-hop artists like Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Lil John and Ludacris – a far cry from the guitar-drenched days of the ‘70s.

“We were sort of cheating the world because there were two of us,” Howard says.

“We had one standing in the control room while the other was moving mics. We could hear the change from location to location. We could get guitar sounds that no one else was getting then because we had two sets of ears.”

How did Criteria Studios form?

Howard: “It was originally started by Mack Emerman. He was recording jazz records at his house in Coconut Grove. His father had a piece of land nearby on which he was going to build a candy store. Mack convinced him to let him have the property, and we built the recording studio.”

Ron: “It was a one-room facility.”

Howard: “It kind of grew from there. When Ron and I started at Criteria, we started in that one room. It grew to a larger room called Studio A, and then there was Studio B, Studio C, Studio D and so on.”

You were innovators in how you recorded sound.

Ron: “As technology improved, we’d work on our skills. We’d come in late – everybody else would go home at six o’clock. We came up with our multi-mic technique for recording drums: we’d go overhead, have one mic on the kick and mics on every cymbal.

“Part of getting a good guitar sound was knowing the instrument. People will still behave like they’re on stage, and put a microphone straight on a guitar – but if you move the mic six inches to the left, or right, or down, suddenly the sound is so much different.”

Early on, you worked with Jimi Hendrix, who’s primarily known for working with Eddie Kramer. What was that like?

Ron: “Eddie was the chief engineer at Electric Lady, and I was the chief engineer at Criteria. We became friends. Eddie would stay at my house in Miami, and I would stay at his house if I was in New York.

“We were the Miami Pop Festival, which came before Woodstock – kind of a dry run. We had all our equipment in the truck, along with our custom console.

“Eddie came with Jimi; Jimi was on stage and Eddie came in the truck with us. Eddie says, ‘You tape it,’ because he didn’t know our setup.

“We recorded him there, and that became part of our resume, due to Eddie. He’s a good friend.”

How did you become involved with Derek and the Dominos?

Howard: “We were doing a lot of Atlantic Records acts, and they were one of the acts that came through. It was amazing to work with them because they were such amazing players and musicians. It was like a big jam session – which was good because we had a lot of good pieces to put together.”

What was it like working with Eric Clapton and Duane Allman?

Ron: “Eric was in England when they started rehearsing, then he decided to come to Miami. When we started the sessions they didn’t have a name, but it was a real band. I remember we set up Eric and Duane in the studio, so they were face-to-face about two feet apart.

“They could literally touch each other’s guitars if they wanted to; and, like Howard said, it was a good jam session. Eric’s playing was unbelievable because he was held up by Duane’s playing, and Duane was held up by Eric. The rest is history.”

Another big piece of your history is your relationship with the Allman Brothers Band.

Ron: “Duane, of course, gets all the credit – but there’s no Allman Brothers without Dickey Betts. Dickey came up with all the harmonies, and Duane played ‘em. Not unlike Eric and Duane, Dickey and Duane were on such a plane together.

“Dickey’s style was so unique in his harmony parts. We’d sit in the studio for hours, rewinding the tape to play it back for him.

“We knew we already had the track, but he’d work for hours getting those harmony parts together. He would show them to Duane, he’d play them, and what came out was Jessica or In Memory of Elizabeth Reed. That stuff doesn’t happen without Dickey.”

Howard: “Dickey had this way of playing; he matched what Duane did on slide, but he’d do it pretty much without a slide. It was pretty amazing what he’d come up with.”

Ron: “Duane died when he was 24 years old; but the thing was that, without people knowing it, Dickey had stepped into the leadership role.”

You also worked with Joe Walsh on The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get.

Howard: “That was an awe-inspiring guitar moment for us. We did that record with Joe in Studio C, and we kind of had him set up in the hallway. We went through the intro; he was playing and he had no idea we were actually recording it.

“As he was getting ready to say, ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ we called him in and said, ‘Now you’re done.’ Rocky Mountain Way was done in one take, so that was pretty good!”

What was it like working with the Rolling Stones on Goat's Head Soup?

Ron: “They were really great. They drove themselves to the studio in rented station wagons – they didn’t come in limousines. When they arrived, they took their guitars out of the cases and tuned up themselves. They were just like regular people.

“Keith Richards is a character, alright! But I think the one thing that stands out was when we came in one day, and they were hopping around like bunnies for the whole session!”

You also worked with Frank Zappa in the ‘70s.

Howard: “All these players come in with their own sound. Our job is to capture that sound. All these guys use Fender or Gibson guitars and whatever brand of amp, but Frank was a player with his own approach.

“I think that’s what gave him the sound, along with the ideas. And our job was to capture that sound; and again, that comes down to knowing where to place a mic. We really needed to listen to what Frank was playing and then figure out how to get it all to tape.”

You’re renowned for your drum sounds, but you greatly impacted the guitar landscape too. What are you most proud of at that end?

Howard: “Well, I’m proud we lived through it! But I don't know… we were in the right place at the right time. We had some talent and knew what we were doing, and that came out in the records. But we had an extremely high caliber of people that we worked with, and that certainly helped make something that lasts.”

Ex-Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention bassist Tom Fowler passed away on July 2 at the age of 73, following medical complications from an aneurysm. Fellow Zappa alum Arthur Barrow shared the news via social media.

“So sad to report another big loss in the Zappa community,” wrote Barrow on Facebook. “Tom Fowler left us yesterday, July 2, 2024. He was a hero to me. The first time I heard Echidna's I almost fell over when he played the big 5/16 lick on the bass!

“I had no idea that a clumsy bass could do such a thing! He was an inspiration for me to buy a bass and start practicing. I have known him since about 1976. RIP old friend – missing you very much.”

Born in Salt Lake City, Fowler started his music journey at an early age, taking up the violin at age six, followed by the upright bass, and finally, the electric bass at 16, after hearing the works of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa.

In 1971, he joined the psych-rock band It's a Beautiful Day for their third album Choice Quality Stuff/Anytime (1971), and the live album It's a Beautiful Day at Carnegie Hall (1972). After departing the band in 1972, he spent a year at the University of Utah, moved to New York to play jazz, and later moved to San Francisco, where he picked up the violin again.

It was in San Francisco that Fowler got the opportunity to join Zappa's band. “[Jack] Bruce called me up and I auditioned for Frank and somehow, I got the gig. I hadn't even been playing bass, but I guess he got sick of looking for a bass player. This was in 1973,” Fowler said in an interview with T'Mershi Duween.

“The audition was very simple. He had me play a couple of odd muted things and groove for a while, and then he said ‘OK, you're it.’ That was a really good band. I then just did Frank's stuff for a few years until I broke my hand in the middle of a tour which was my downfall.

“One thing that people don't realize about the bands is that Frank didn't write everything by any means, but he remembered everything. When we were having those long rehearsals, we were all jiving around and having fun; not at first, but as we got looser. The 1974 band was really loose – we could [play] anything we goddamn wanted.”

He made his recording debut with Zappa on Over-Nite Sensation (1973), playing on more Zappa albums up to Studio Tan (1978). 

In addition to Zappa, Fowler played bass for several other acts, including Jean-Luc Ponty, Steve Hackett, and George Duke. He also founded the jazz fusion band Air Pocket with his brothers and pursued his own solo work, as well as performing with Ray Charles, playing most of the bass in the 2004 biopic Ray.

In the T'Mershi Duween interview, Fowler shared his nuggets of wisdom on what makes a concert work. “A live situation has to have lots of peaks and valleys and it's a good show, then you can have slow stuff.”

As to his dream concert lineup: “Frank Zappa and Ray Charles in concert together for the first time, with special guest appearances from Jean-Luc Ponty and It's a Beautiful Day. And there's my life in a one concert nutshell. Fowler Brothers as the opening act. Then we all go to my restaurant and eat something.”

Since his days alongside Frank Zappa, David Bowie and Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew has refused to remain static. Now, at 74, the Kentucky-born Strato-slinger is at it again, this time with his latest and entirely mega project, Beat.

You’ll have heard the news, which Fripp leaked a few weeks before the band formally announced themselves in April. And you’ll be preparing for wild prog rock dreams to come true when Belew hits the stage with Steve Vai, Tony Levin and Danny Carey to celebrate King Crimson’s well-loved ‘80s albums Discipline (1981), Beat (1982) and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984).

Though Fripp declined an invitation to participate, Belew was glad to receive his blessing, because he holds his ex bandmate in the highest esteem.

“It was a great pairing,” Belew says. “We could interlock our styles of guitar playing – but we could also go completely apart from each other. It was wonderful; I knew what he was going to play and vice versa. We did three world tours; and strangely, those records are now coming back into people’s minds again. I think they’re as fresh as ever.”

Taking on King Crimson music without Fripp is challenging, but Belew believes he and Vai are up for it. “The internet is already full of comments and thoughts, so it’s a lot of pressure. I think we’ll do great. Steve and I will have to do the same thing that Robert and I did – Steve and I are going to be guitar partners. I’m absolutely certain he can do it.”

“He’s on tour now with Joe Satriani. I texted him yesterday and I said, ‘I’m thinking about adding these two songs. Did you happen to bring that book of transcriptions?’ And he said, ‘It’s sitting right here beside me on the bus.’ We’ll dedicate ourselves to trying to bring this music from where it once was to where we are now.”

You, along with several other alumni, have been celebrating the music of David Bowie lately. 

“I sometimes join the large expedition, where they put a new band together. I’ve had a lot of chances to go back through that era and listen through it again. What happened to me from ’77 through about ’82, with Frank Zappa straight into Bowie straight into Talking Heads straight into King Crimson, I was traveling at light speed!”

You came in during a pretty experimental period alongside the D.A.M. Trio. What was that like?

“It’s hard to remember because so many things happened so fast. It was like I was halfway dreaming, halfway awake; I just could’t focus – like, ‘This is what’s happening here. Not two years ago, I was making $75 a night, if I made that much, playing in bars. And now here I am at Madison Square Garden with David Bowie!’

“I was lucky to fall into that era of his music; the Brian Eno trilogy, as they call it. They were stretching things and trying a lot of new things, and I seemed a good fit for that. They used to laugh at me, saying: ‘You’re not supposed to be able to play that!’”

It must have been a trip going from working with Bowie after someone like Frank Zappa.

“Frank’s work, for me, was life lessons – how to be in the music business, be a professional touring musician and travel around the world. Maybe even, you know, make records or films; we did both of those.

“It was how to how to run your own business – so many things that weren’t really related to the notes and the sound. But of course, learning five hours of Frank Zappa material was a 24/7 job for me the whole time!

“I was catching up because I was the only one in the band who didn't read music. Frank wanted you to play his music correctly and consistently. He wasn’t really there for you to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to try this. How about that?’

“That was not Frank’s way. He had everything the way he wanted, and he needed people to play it right, be on time, and not come in half-drunk or any of those stupid things.”

How did working with Zappa prepare you for what was to come with Bowie?

“It was a school and I graduated from it. Before that point no one had really shown me anything – not even how to play guitar. I worked things out myself. To have someone of Frank’s stature, his genius, telling me what to do and showing me the ropes, was more important than even being in the band. It was incredible tutoring.”

“David wanted someone to just go wild on guitar. That’s what he needed; Frank didn’t need that from me. He needed me to sing a lot and play his parts. David needed me to grow wings and fly away. And he encouraged that all the time.

“You can see in some of the videos that, while I’m taking a solo, David’s standing with his arms crossed and beaming like a Cheshire cat because he just loves it. He loved to hear people go wild like that.

“And it fit in with what he was doing: David’s music was always strangely mainstream and yet really off-the-wall, especially during that period.”

I imagine your previous experience of working things out on your own lent itself to going off the wall with him. 

“Absolutely. I was ready to go. I didn’t have a lot of titles or sounds to choose from, but I was able to combine them in different ways with some of the hand techniques I was using, like bending the neck and crazy things like that.

“It all came across as kind of a new picture; I don’t think anyone had heard or seen that. It was another thing David loved – he wanted somebody that could kind of match his stage thing, not just another player standing up there playing their instrument.”

Did your gear change much as you transitioned from Zappa to Bowie?

“Oh, yeah – everything changed. When I was with Frank, I had just come from nowhere; I had no equipment to speak of. I auditioned for Frank through a little Pignose [battery-powered] amp. But by the time I got to David, I had discovered a the Roland Jazz Chorus [JC-120], and that became my amp.

“That really changed things. It was a completely different way of playing guitar. Strangely, it’s solid-state, very clean, and Japanese-sounding. But there were other things you could do – you could warm it up and pair it with some of the Electro-Harmonix pedals.

“One day I realized that if I walked over in front of the Roland Jazz Chorus, a Stereo Chorus amp, I could suddenly point the guitar at the front of the amp and move it around, and it would make this incredible oscillating sound.

“I could take the chorus setting and move it back and forth between that and vibrato and so forth. It’s a sound you cannot possibly get – no pedal in the world will make it. It’s a natural occurrence between two speakers being in chorus together. I used that a lot of early records.”

How did you take the rig you used with Bowie and push it forward with King Crimson?

“The main thing that changed from that first period from David to Talking Heads to King Crimson was that I went to Japan. I met the people at Roland and they said, ‘We have a new thing – a guitar synthesizer.’ I’d been dying to have something akin to what keyboard players could do for 10 years, and they gave me one.”

You were one of the earliest adopters of the guitar synth, right?

“I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure I had the first one in New York, as they weren’t available there yet. When I joined King Crimson, Robert had a Roland JC-120 and also the synthesizer; it was actually the second one they made, but it was the first one that anyone ever used.

“The first one has been a bit too much – it was like a big Farfisa organ. The second one is the blue one, the GR-300. So much of the King Crimson sound of the ‘80s came from that one device.

“It was a simple instrument: you could only do maybe five or six things with it, and you had to manually tune all the different oscillators. You couldn’t save a sound! It was the era before things got much more digitized.”

You’re primarily known as a Strat guy, so the guitar synth must have been a shock to the system.

“Even if you just put it with the guitar, you had a very unusual sound. The guitar didn’t sound like a normal guitar and that really changed things. So the next thing I did in that period was my first solo record, Lone Rhino, using all the things I had coming from David, Talking Heads and King Crimson.”

What was that setup like?

“The Strat and maybe four, five or six little pedals. But for Twang Bar King, the second solo record, I started using the guitar synth. I had Fender build me a Mustang with all the accoutrements from the guitar synthesizer.

“You had all kinds of things you could operate from the guitar, and you had to have a special pickup. Once that got designed, I started using what became known as the ‘Twang Bar King guitar’ because I made that record with it. I used that in King Crimson from there on.”

You’d matched wits with Zappa, Bowie, Eno and David Byrne – a lot of interesting characters. What was it like working alongside Fripp?

“The first thing with Robert was that he’d already designed the kind of guitar playing he favored – fast picking; very, very precise. He needed a second guitar player to play it. It required two people playing the same thing, offsetting from each other. Frame by Frame is a great example of it.

“Robert and I sat down for hours every day; I had to get up to speed with being able to play like him. After we got to a certain point, and I was getting good enough to do it – because it wasn’t my style at all, and I’m not the best picker in the world – and Robert was feeling good about it, I started trying to write songs with it.

“Then it was, ‘Okay, get back to your Stratocaster and start making your sounds like an elephant!’ It really came to the point where Robert and I had separated into our own worlds. I always said it was two sides of the same coin: Robert has his approach, and I had my approach of making those sounds, noises, feedback, and bird calls.”

Fripp named the Beat project – is that right?

“Yes – in brief, I’d been working on the idea of putting together a band to do those three records – Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair – the ‘80s trilogy. I talked to Robert in 2019 and he declined being any part of it. But he said, ‘If you want to celebrate King Crimson and you want to drive it, go ahead. I will give you my blessing.’”

How did Steve Vai become involved?

“We started thinking, ‘Well, who could possibly be in the band?’ The big part would be, ‘Who would step into Robert’s role?’ The only person I could think of was Steve. I heard him say in an interview that he had a lot of affection and admiration for Robert.

“So I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s a chance – you never know.’ I called him, and lo and behold, he was so excited; I couldn’t believe it. So we started talking… and then, of course, COVID hit. That added another two and a half years onto the waiting process.

“I wasn’t sure Steve would ever be able to do it because, after COVID, he had 18 months of touring commitments that he’d previously booked. We had to keep waiting. By the time we thought, ‘Okay, let’s call Steve now,’ he was ready to do it; he thought he could fit it into his busy schedule.”

Is that when you approached Tony Levin and Danny Carey?

“Yes. Tony had been in King Crimson, but I didn't think we were ever going to get him. But his schedule opened and he was delighted to do it – he said, ‘It would be a big challenge!’ But he accepts that kind of thing. He thrives on it.

“I thought, ‘Wow, we are one person away from having the kind of elite musicians that could do this.’ I didn’t want to have a band that didn’t do it as well as it could possibly be done. You had to have people of that caliber. And then Danny Carey came into the picture. 

“I’ve known Danny for many years; he’s always talked so much about Bill Bruford and those three records. He said that when he first started drumming, those were the things he listened to and was inspired by.

“So I knew he was a huge fan of that music. The same thing happened – the Tool tour was about to end and they were going into writing mode and didn’t know how long that would take. So yes, Danny wanted to go off for a few months with us.”

How will you and Steve approach the gig?

“We got together in L.A. after we had all that stuff in place. He and I sat down in his studio full of gorgeous stuff – like 400 guitars – and we sat there for a whole day ticking through. We listened to all the songs I had decided we should do; although I’m still considering things. I’m going to have that done in a few days.

“We had a book with all the material transcribed for guitar – my parts and Robert’s, except my solos. They say in the book that there’s no way they can tell you how to play my solos. And that’s true because I can’t either!

“I think it really relieved Steve a lot because he wants to make sure that what we do is honorable to the originals. Not that we have to play them exactly the same, and not that we're going to be a cover band. We certainly will not be over time; I believe we will make it our own. 

“But there are many well-defined elements in King Crimson’s music that have to be there. Steve was concerned about those things, and after we went through it, and I told him the things I thought we could branch out from, he felt a lot more relieved.”

What’s the key to locking in with Steve, seeing as you’re both going to need a lot of space?

“We don’t know – we have yet to play a note! I suspect Steve and I will end up being the same as Robert and me. A different version of it, of course, but two sides of the same coin.

“I’m anxious to hear what he’ll come up with – which won’t be just him playing Robert’s parts. But Robert’s parts are fantastic, and they will need to be there. Once we’ve had some rehearsals, I’ll tell you how it’s going. Until then, I’m guessing.”

• Beat commence their tour on September 12. See Beat Tour for full dates.

Little Feat and Frank Zappa's Mothers of Inventions guitarist Lowell George will be honored with a tribute album dropping on May 17. The double LP, Long Distance Love - A Sweet Relief Tribute to Lowell George, features 25 Lowell George tracks reinterpreted by Elvis Costello, Ben Harper, and Dave Alvin, among many other artists.

The tribute will be released in collaboration with Sweet Relief, an organization dedicated to providing financial support to career musicians and music industry workers struggling to make ends meet. It's a worthy homage to Lowell George's diverse catalog and contributions to the music industry.

The full tracklisting is below.

1. Trouble - Mike Viola
2. Cold, Cold, Cold - Joachim Cooder
3. Long Distance Love - Elvis Costello
4. Heartache - Bedouine
5. I’ve Been The One - Bhi Bhiman
6. Rock ‘n’ Roll Doctor - Miles Tackett
7. Be One Now - Lady Blackbird
8. Love Needs A Heart - Madison Cunningham
9. Easy To Slip - Jonah Tolchin
10. Dixie Chicken - Eleni Mandell and Milo Jones
11. Roll ‘Um Easy - Ben Harper
12. Lafayette Railroad - Larry Goldings
13. 6 Feet Of Snow - Jack Shit
14. Cheek To Cheek - Gaby Moreno
15. Two Trains Running - Chris Seefried
16. China White - Chris Stills
17. A Apolitical Blues - Dave Alvin
18. Feats Don’t Fail Me Now - Sugaray Rayford
19. Sailin’ Shoes - Taylor Goldsmith
20. Spanish Moon - Inara George
21. Rocket In My Pocket - Sam Morrow
22. Willin’ - Jonathan Wilson
23. Teenage Nervous Breakdown - The Bird and the Bee
24. Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie - Andras Jones
25. 20 Million Things To Do - Gus Seyffert

Lowell George began his music career as a member of Frank Zappa's legendary Mothers of Invention. After leaving the band, he formed Little Feat with Bill Payne. During his seven-year tenure with Little Feat, the band released eight albums through which he showcased his virtuosic lead and slide guitar skills – Jimmy Page once named Little Feat as his “favorite American group“.

During that time, George was also an in-demand slide guitar session player. You can hear his work in many seminal albums recorded during the '70s, including John Cale's Paris 1919 (1973), Bonnie Raitt's Takin' My Time (1973), and Jackson Browne's The Pretender (1976).

In a 1976 interview with Guitar Player, Lowell George recounted how he adopted the slide guitar style:

“Actually, I was in a session, and I used to play a lot of open D tuning, and a friend of mine said “Watch this.” He tuned the A string down to G, and in fact it was an open G tuning! Then he went, “see this!” and he picked up an old flower vase and went whee! I said to myself, “That’s it!” and that’s what started it about six years ago.”

He also talked about his humble approach to playing guitar: “From the time I was 21, when I first started playing professionally, I thought I was hot stuff. From the time I was 23 until I was 28, I was completely under the impression that I wasn’t any good. Just recently, I started not caring about it at all – I just play!”

“A big stumbling block is one’s own attitude or vision of himself as a musician. I’ve known guys that are great guitar players, but they’ve got such high standards of themselves that they’re complete jerks, and nobody will play with them.”

Long Distance Love - A Sweet Relief Tribute to Lowell George is out on May 17 on Flatiron Recordings.

Dweezil Zappa has announced a huge new guitar gear auction via online platform, AnalogR, including a whole host of unique electric guitars, amps and effects pedals befitting one of the world’s most distinctive players.

The headline item is likely a Custom Shop recreation of Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats Gibson Les Paul (carrying an estimate of $35,000 - 75,000), which was built in the early 2010s under the watchful eye of Gibson’s head luthier Jim DeCola and aimed to recreate the heavily customized instrument used on Zappa Sr.’s album Hot Rats.

The listing, rather brilliantly, describes it as “an intensely crafted ‘Super Guitar’ with a separate piezo output”, and shares some further insight on the build from Dweezil…

"My father famously played a Gibson Les Paul gold top during the recording sessions for his classic album Hot Rats,” says Zappa. 

“The guitar was stolen from him while on tour in Europe between 1969-1970. I worked with Jim DeCola at Gibson to faithfully recreate the guitar in exacting detail. I added a few things the original did not have, a piezo pickup and a modification to the Bigsby bridge to make it easier to re-string.”

The instrument was used on Zappa’s 2020 tour dates, in which the band performed the entirety of Hot Rats. 

“We made it as era-specific as we could, so it looks beat-up and it has the missing knobs,” Zappa explained to Guitarist in 2020. 

“My dad’s Goldtop had P-90s, with that Tele pickup jammed in right next to the bridge. But as much as I love the sound of P-90s, I don’t love the noise that comes with them. So I basically have humbucking P-90s and a Tele pickup, all made by a Canadian guy called Tim McNelly. I can make them single coil with one switch, but I can also make them go out of phase in different ways.”

Other standouts in the sale include PRS’ very first Dweezil Zappa signature guitar (est. $35,000) build. It is signed by Paul Reed Smith and features the individual wood grain selected by Zappa. 

“I wanted to do something that was different from the regular shape of PRS,” explains Zappa. 

“I said, ‘What other things have you made? Show me some shapes.’ And they had made a mandolin. I said, ‘Let's just make the mandolin shape, but big, like a guitar… This is a one-of-one. It has all of my ideas that have come to life in this single instrument.”

Elsewhere, there’s a Jackson Dinky finished with the cover of Madonna’s True Blue album (est. $35,000). It featured on the cover of Dweezil’s album My Guitar wants to Kill Your Mama and is signed by the Queen of Pop herself. 

Then there’s a Cornford MK-5 head and cabinet used on his first Zappa plays Zappa tour, a vintage Gibson Barney Kessel, a Fender Duo Sonic Supra 56 (featured on Zappa’s own records and Lisa Loeb’s Cake and Pie), a Fender Jeff Beck signature model (modded with a trio of Custome Chandler Lipstick single coils) and some weird and wonderful pedals, including the sought-after Korg Miku guitar/vocal syntheiser and a host of boutique boxes… Suffice to say, the list goes on.

To check out the full Dweezil Zappa gear auction, set to end on Friday (April 5), head to AnalogR.

Pete Griffin’s reputation as an A-list sideman is founded on two decades of exceptional bass guitar work across a multitude of genres and musical settings. The very definition of his low-end artistry in recent times – though sadly it’s ended now – was a very special rock supergroup, Generation Axe, that saw Griffin share the stage with guitarists Zakk Wylde, Tosin Abasi, Nuno Bettencourt, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Steve Vai.

Yet in spite of his illustrious sideman career and the huge respect in which he’s held within the music world (and not just by bassists) – earning a 2008 Grammy Award with Zappa Plays Zappa – Griffin has never released a solo EP. Until now. 

“I decided to start working on some of my own music during the pandemic,” said Griffin. “I had a home studio and I knew some of the world's best musicians who were willing to work on my songs. I’ve always seen myself as a sideman because that's what pays the bills, but I realised I needed to have control over something in my life during a time when I had very little.”

Pete Griffin and His Lab Rats is not a self-indulgent bass-centred release; instead, it’s an eclectic collaboration with some of today’s unsung heroes from the L.A. session scene. “As session players we’re not always paid to make creative decisions. Sometimes our job is to just shut up and play whatever’s written! But I didn’t realise how much creative energy we’d all been saving for something like this. It became a very collaborative project.”

So after months of anticipation Griffin’s new solo EP has arrived, but how does he feel about stepping out from his traditional sideman role? 

“In the sideman world there can be various definitions of right and wrong. I might think that my idea is better than what the singer is asking me to do, but you can only work within the parameters that you’ve been given, and if that’s my job, then I'm very happy doing that. It can be an interesting dynamic, but having now produced my own music, I think I have a little more respect for the process.”

What was it like playing with Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Zakk Wylde, Nuno Bettencourt, and Tosin Abasi, in Generation Axe?

“All of those guys have a completely different approach. Yngwie would send recordings ahead of time and he would just expect you to know everything. Zakk Wylde might want to play a bunch of Black Sabbath covers, so that requires my best Geezer Butler impersonation!” 

What about Steve Vai?

“Steve Vai is incredibly specific. There’s one tune called Gravity Storm, which sounded to me like the bassline was being played with a slide into the note. Steve stopped me in sound check one day and basically told me that I needed to bend the note up half a step before I hit it, and then let the string bend back down. I was like, ‘what are you talking about? You just don’t do that on bass!’ But he's so granular about the details, and it turns out the bassline sounded way better once I started doing that!”

Is it the same with Nuno Bettencourt?

“Both Steve and Nuno think more like a producer. They’d never just give me the recording to learn. Nuno would give me very specific instructions about what he wanted the bassline to do. Get The Funk Out by Extreme starts with a drum fill and he wanted me to play a dead note right in the middle of it, and he told me exactly where. He even sat down and showed our drummer how to play it!”

Tell us about the recent tour with Dethklok

“I was covering that gig for Bryan Beller, which meant that I had three different versions of what to play. There's the original that Brendan Small played on the record, which was pretty straight-forward. But then I’d go listen to Bryan and he's got his whole three finger thing going on. I’ve also done the gig a few times in the past, so I had to decide whether to play the bass part as it is on the record, trying to copy what Bryan’s been doing, or finding my own version.”

How much direction did you get ahead of time?

“Brendon Small knows that the album version works, and both Bryan and I have been working with him for years, so he trusts us whenever we want to add anything. Some days I'll check in with him, but otherwise I'm left to figure it out from the tracks I've been given.”

Do you have any new bass gear? 

“I've been a Fender-type guy for most of my career. There was a point where there was an expectation to always play a Fender Jazz or P-Bass, but I’ve been really enjoying a Dingwall D-Roc that I just got, which has the multi-scale setup. I'm loving that bass just as much as the tried and true Leo Fender design. With Dethklok, I’m tuning down to low C and it can be hard to find a string that responds well at that range.” 

“I have a Dunable bass that's a 35-inch scale and the E-string on the Dingwall is 36.25, so the extra scale length just makes everything more comfortable, especially when you’re playing the faster songs. I love that there are companies out there that are still open to trying something new, and I think people are a more open-minded about it nowadays.”

Tell us about the gig with Zappa Plays Zappa?

“I was the biggest Zappa fan before I got that gig, so I could already sing any song that Dweezil wanted to play. Dweezil might want to start working on Zomby Woof, which sounds like someone's switching the radio channel every four bars, but I had unknowingly been doing my homework for that gig without ever knowing that it was going to exist, so I already had it locked in. Joe Travers is in charge of the entire vault of Frank Zappa recordings, of which there are still years of tape. He’s still revisiting old recordings, so how do you ever stop?”

Did Dweezil feel under pressure from living in his Dad's shadow?

“I can't even imagine, but you know, Dweezil's such an incredible guitar player. He would struggle with certain musical concepts just because he hadn't gone to music school. He learned by having Eddie Van Halen come over to the house and show him how to play! There would be certain songs, like The Black Page or Inca Roads, where he'd play something unbelievable, but then he’d struggle with an eight bar phrase that the rest of us could play in our sleep. He was really kind of an anomaly like that, but I can't even imagine what it was like for him.”

“Towards the end of his life Frank was working almost exclusively with something called the Synclavier, which was a very early DAW. It was like a mini sequencer. He just got sick of working with human musicians and their physical limitations and their emotional baggage. That Synclavier took up the whole room, but now we have an infinitely more powerful computer in our pockets. So if Frank Zappa was alive today? It’s almost too frightening to think about.”

Do you think Frank Zappa’s legacy still resonates?

“It’s like King Crimson or some of these bands where you need someone to hold your hand and walk you through it. So I hope more people can find Frank Zappa and find that thing that they like instead of just going, ‘Oh, isn't he the Valley Girl guy?’ The first stuff that I got into was Apostrophe and Roxy & Elsewhere.

Tell us about One Shot Deal

“We’ve basically got the core band back together with the blessing of the Zappa family. We’re called One Shot Deal, and we were playing the music of Frank Zappa all around Southern California. People have been really excited to see our camaraderie. To bring that back around has been a real pleasure.”

• Pete Griffin And His Lab Rats is out now.

Compound time is where the beats are subdivided into groups of three or six – for instance in 6/8 or 12/8. If you’re a blues-rock type of player, the most familiar use of compound time might be in a slow 12/8 blues or a shuffle. 

It’s common for soloists to use even subdivisions of the beat to float over the pulse. These also add greater rhythmic variety to the palette of rhythms that we as soloists can call upon. Fantastic exponents of compound time range from Frank Zappa to Robben Ford. 

We’ll start by exploring the pulse of these time signatures. When you start experimenting you should aim to find various rhythms within the pulse. Our first example shows some options beyond just playing a swing ‘crotchet to quaver’ rhythm. Once the feel is internalised, we’ll show the even subdivision of the beat in groups of two and four, exploring lines that exploit this.

Example 2 starts with a line based on the minor pentatonic, so that the notes used are completely familiar. Just running a stream of groups of four is exactly the same as treating the pulse as 4/4 (or 3/4, etc) but with the underlying pulse proceeding with three-note subdivisions.

Robben Ford’s killer solo on Misdirected Blues from his Mystic Mile album has a near iconic line based on the four-note subdivision of the beat over a 12/8 pulse. Ford’s command of harmony is vital to making such a strong statement over the sequence. Using inspiration from that solo, this line navigates the chord tones of C7 with a few approach note techniques.

After this, we’ll experiment with using the underlying three-note subdivision of the beat in combination with even subdivisions.

These two types of subdivisions have a very different feel. In four-note subdivisions it’s easier to land chord tones on the beat in flowing lines, and you’ll often hear this in jazz-influenced playing, like that of Ford. 

Whatever style you’re into, it’s always vital to listen closely to the great players. Keep your ears open for what kind of scales are used, where chord tones fall with regard to the beat, and how they are targeted. Even players like Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan who play mainly pentatonic-based solos, still cleverly target the chord tones, which is why they manage to sound so musical.

Remember the use of space within rhythms is  important. So take a breath now and again when phrasing. Great improvisers say that their sense of phrasing is inspired by the best singers. Why not do the same?  

Get the tone

Amp Settings: Gain 6, Bass 6, Middle 4, Treble 6, Reverb 3

While Frank Zappa used mainly Gibson-style guitars, any electric will work fine here. A classy overdrive pedal in front of a warm sounding American style guitar amp should make these ideas sound authentic. And as the lines aren’t all that fast, a well chosen delay setting shouldn’t obscure the note detail. Add a splash of reverb for a fuller, and more pleasing tone.

Example 1. Subdivisions in 12/8

Our first idea shows beat subdivisions in 12/8 time – three quaver notes make up the dotted crochet main beats. The use of rests can create interesting rhythms.

Example 2. Even subdivisons over uneven ones

Here we have even subdivisions of two and four notes per beat; listen to the audio to understand what’s happening, then duplicate the notes yourself.

Example 3. Even subdivisions over 12/8

This line shows how the even subdivisions of 4 can be used over the 12/8 pulse. It makes for a very unique sound, creating tension over the underlying triplet feel.

Example 4. Chord tones on the beat

This flowing country rock/jazz blues line aims at landing strong chord tones like E and Bb notes (3rd and b7 of the C7 chord) in bar 2 on the beat.

Example 5. Mixing up the subdivisions

Here we mix up the three-note subdivision with the superimposed two and four-note subdivisions to add greater variety to the lines. It’s a freely organic sound.

Example 6. Alternating subdivision types 

This example does the same but alternates whole bars of three and four-note subdivisions. 

Previously unheard recordings from two Frank Zappa concerts in 1980 are to be released later this year.

Zappa ’80: Mudd Club/Munich – a new release sanctioned by the Zappa family – will arrive March 3, featuring two complete shows performed by Zappa’s short-lived five-piece lineup at New York City’s Mudd Club and Munich’s Olympiahalle on May 8,1980 and July 3, 1980, respectively.

The release showcases tracks from Zappa’s 1979 albums, including Joe’s Garage, Keep It Greasy and City of Tiny Lites, as well as various cuts that would subsequently be released on Zappa’s sprawling 1981 album, You Are What You Is.

Its liner notes feature an introduction from Zappa vault master Joe Travers, a detailed track-by-track of the setlists by bassist Arthur Barrow, who was a member of the five-piece lineup, and an essay by Steve Vai, who attended the Mudd Club show as a 19-year-old fan.

Vai would, of course, then be hired by Zappa to transcribe guitar and drum tracks, and go on to actually join the band. “From that point on, the whirlwind world of Frank Zappa that I embarked on for the next 3 years was intense, funny, terrifying at times, but deeply and soulfully rewarding,” Vai says.

Accompanying Zappa for the shows were vocalists Ike Willis and Ray White, bassist Arthur Barror, keyboardist Tommy Mars and drummer David Logeman. The latter’s tenure with Zappa lasted only a year, and Zappa ’80: Mudd Club/Munich is the first release to feature entire shows he played.

Prior to this release, only two tracks from both shows – Love of My Life from the Mudd Club and You Didn’t Try to Call Me from Munich – have been released officially. Both appeared on Zappa’s You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore live CD series.

Ahead of the release, you can listen to Outside Now, recorded at the Mudd Club.

As well as the 3CD set that includes both shows, both the Mudd Club and Munich concerts will be released separately on 2LP and 3LP vinyl, respectively. Pre-orders are available now.

See below for the release's full track list.

Disc 1: Mudd Club, New York, May 8, 1980

1. Mudd Club Show Start
2. Chunga’s Revenge
3. Keep It Greasy
4. Outside Now
5. City Of Tiny Lites (Edited)
6. Pound For A Brown
7. You Are What You 
8. You Didn’t Try To Call Me
9. I Ain’t Got No Heart
10. Love Of My Life
11. Easy Meat
12. Mudd Club
13. The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing
14. Joe’s Garage
15. Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?

Disc 2: Olympiahalle, Munich, Germany, July 3, 1980

1. Munich ’80 Show Start
2. Chunga’s Revenge
3. Keep It Greasy
4. Pick Me, I’m Clean
5. City Of Tiny Lites
6. Pound For A Brown
7. Cosmik Debris
8. You Didn’t Try To Call Me
9. I Ain’t Got No Heart
10. Love Of My Life
11. You Are What You Is

Disc 3: Olympiahalle, Munich, Germany, July 3, 1980 (continued)

1. Easy Meat
2. Mudd Club
3. The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing
4. Joe’s Garage
5. Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?
6. Dancin’ Fool
7. Bobby Brown Goes Down
8. Ms. Pinky
9. Stick It Out
10. Nite Owl (T. Allen)
11. The Illinois Enema Bandit

Since developing the Ibanez JEM in 1987, Steve Vai’s ability to guide his artistic vision to fruition has always been strong. 

Here, he reminds us of the strides he took to bring the initial JEM guitar to life, and why – after three decades with this original signature guitar – he decided it was “time for a little change” with the PIA.

The JEM has been around for 35 years. At the beginning, why did you feel the need to develop that guitar?

“I was fortunate working for Frank Zappa because one of the things I learned from him is if you want something, just do it. So Frank was molesting his guitars with electronics and putting things in them, like frequency modulators and parametric EQs, and I’m changing the necks, changing the pickups. 

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s what you do. You find what you want.’ I loved Strats because they had a whammy bar, but I didn’t like the way they sounded. They weren’t rock ’n’ roll enough to me. I loved Les Pauls because Jimmy Page played a Les Paul and they had a better sound for me, but they weren’t sexy to me. They felt awkward and none of them you could really comfortably play in the high register. I don’t know why they give you the frets when they don’t give you the access to them. 

“I knew that I wanted to have something that was not necessarily one of those. Edward [Van Halen] came out with a humbucker on a Strat-style guitar, that was perhaps the first SuperStrat. That was fantastic because now we can get a really good, big fat sound with a whammy bar. But there were things about that guitar that were very limiting to me. So very innocently I decided, ‘What do I want? I could have anything made.’”

Were you thinking about this potential guitar purely on a personal level at that stage?

“I didn’t think, ‘I’m going to design something here that everybody’s going to love, and it’s going to make me a lot of money.’ None of that. It was just, what do you want? I went down to Charvel, met Grover Jackson. He gave me a guitar that turned into the Green Meanie. It still was missing a lot of the things I was looking for, but it had humbuckers.

“I knew that I wanted 24 frets, which was very rare at the time. I didn’t know any guitars that had 24 frets – and I think maybe the Jackson was one of the first. I knew I wanted my hand to be able to comfortably fit without any obstructions. I knew I wanted it to look sexier than a Strat or a Les Paul in my mind. And I knew I wanted a pull up on the bar, and no guitars did that. 

“So I actually took a hammer and screwdriver and I chiselled out all this shit. Next thing you know, I had a floating tremolo and you could pull up on it and break the string if you wanted and, to me, that’s a good time.”

• Steve Vai offers a guided tour of his favorite guitars

What about the pickup configuration?

“I really liked that ‘tubey’ Strat sound with the two single coils. I had to make the five-position switch so when it’s in the neck position, you get the full-on neck humbucker. When you click it to the next position, it splits the coil on the humbucker and you get two single coils, so you get that Strat-y sound. 

“Then the single coil in the middle, if you ever wanted it, I never use it. Then the next position splits the coil on the treble position; that’s the Strat sound I always liked. And then you’ve got your full-on humbucker in the treble position. So they tell me that was unique at the time. Also, I can never understand why the input jack in a Strat or a Les Paul is built so that if you step on the cable, the thing pulls out. It’s like, duh, put it on an angle.”

So, how did the handle come about?

“Joe Despagni was a kid that was my best friend since before kindergarten. All through the rock ’n’ roll high school years, Joe and I were inseparable. And he was one of these MacGyver tinkerers and he was starting to build guitars, too. He was the first one to put a handle in the guitar when we were kids. 

“I didn’t assume to put it in the JEM until a little later. There were four that I made, prototype JEMs. I took them on tour with Dave Roth. And once I joined Dave’s band, all the guitar companies wanted me to endorse them, but I just felt like, ‘Thank you. But I have my guitar.’ They were like, ‘We’ll make that guitar for you.’

“I sent the schematics to a whole handful of the big companies that were interested [in making the guitar] and they all fucking flopped. They sent me their guitar with my name on it and some little tiny adjustments and I’m scratching my head going, ‘Why are you sending me this?’ Except for Ibanez. In three weeks, man, they made a JEM and they made it exactly the way I wanted. And that was it. I said yes. 

“They said, ‘Well, we want to make these for other people, too.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Who’s going to want this? It’s so weird, weirdly idiosyncratic to me.’ And they said, ‘Well, Mr Steve, we think a lot of people.’ So I thought, ‘There are some interesting aspects of this guitar that will probably be borrowed and that’s fine. That’s how it works. So I have to do something that nobody’s going to have the balls to steal.’ 

“That’s when the Monkey Grip came in. At first, I put it in because we were shooting a video with Dave Roth and I wanted to have something where I could take the guitar and spin it around. But then there was something quirky and very Vai about it. Poor Ibanez, I said, ‘This is the guitar, but I want a Monkey Grip in it. And also dayglow colours.’”

What was the reception when the production model was released?

“Part of my agreement with them was that they could release a lower-end model because the JEM was very expensive, and that turned into the Ibanez RG. Lightning struck because it hit a nerve with all the players. It became the No 1 metal rock guitar for many years. And the RG was, I think, either the second or the third biggest-selling guitar in a given year. It’s usually a Strat, Les Paul and an RG of sorts, and the JEM has just had incredible staying power. “

And now you have introduced the PIA. How did that come about?

“After 30 years of me playing the guitar that is completely comfortable for me, it was time for a little change. So the first thing I knew I wanted to mess around with was the grip. Do something a little more artistic. That took a while, a year and a half of coming up with the teardrop cutaway. 

“The yin and yang and positioning. Just the positioning alone took a long time because then we decided to take these dimensions – and even their relationship with one another – and incorporated them into the rest of the body. All of these designs here, they’re based on the ratio of these petals.”

And the back cover snaps on with magnets instead of screws?

“Yes. I’m not a fan of guitars that require tools to do anything. For decades, I’ve been trying to find somebody who can create a nut that eliminates the need of a tool, especially changing strings and stuff like that, but I just haven’t met anybody smart enough to figure it out.”

It’s like if the JEM is a teenager, this is like the grown-up version, right?

“That’s the young adult. The PIA is a very pleasing-to-the-eye guitar.”  

The opening frame of Alex Winter’s 2020 intimate-portrait “biopic” documentary, Zappa, shows Frank Zappa onstage at the Sports Hall in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1991 holding the Stratocaster you see on the cover of The Guitar World According to Frank Zappa, a 34-minute collection of rare Zappa solos on an audio cassette that Guitar World released in 1987. 

“This is the first time I’ve had a reason to play my guitar in three years – and now I will try and tune my guitar,” he says. It was to be his penultimate recorded guitar performance. (The Prague date was June 24, 1991, followed by his performance in Budapest at the “Farewell Festival,” celebrating the withdrawal of Russian troops from Hungary, June 30, 1991.)

In fact, it was several years before that – in October 1986 – that I interviewed Zappa at his Laurel Canyon Fortress of Solitude, later occupied by Lady Gaga and sold just before we went to press, to plan out the tracks of that very same Guitar World cassette – and talk about guitar stuff. [A vinyl edition of the album was re-released on Record Store Day, April 13, 2019.]

As we – GW associate publisher Greg Di Benedetto and I – descended with Frank into the bowels of his private inferno, otherwise known as the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen (U.M.R.K.), he told me with a straight face that he hadn’t played serious guitar in two years and that he’d even lost his calluses.

After viewing the documentary, I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and weighed his statement about giving up on the guitar back in ’84 against his liner note on the cassette about the song A Solo from Atlanta, recorded live in autumn 1984: “There weren’t very many people at this concert. Too bad they missed it. This was toward the end of the 1984 tour. The last concert of the tour was the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, December 23. I haven’t played the guitar at all since then.”

So... with the benefit of hindsight, having watched the Zappa documentary, am I to deduce that Frank missed his beloved ax so much that he picked it up again in 1991, practiced with it, jammed enough to build up his calluses to the point where he could regale the Czech faithful one last time with his finger-lickin’-good chops on that Strat before shedding his mortal coil to join Jimi, Janis and Johnny “Guitar” Watson in that great jam session in the sky? 

Yes, he did. Because even though he denied it, Frank loved the guitar, and the image of him with that Les Paul with the cigarette always stuck in the nut endures.

“Once I figured out that the pitch changed once you put your fingers down on the fretboard, I was hell on wheels,” he says in the film. Whether he acknowledged it or not, Zappa had been admired by guitarists for years because of the sheer free-flying gonzo-ness of his solos within the otherwise-precise organization of his compositions. 

He was always a real Mother of a player. As a bandleader, his insistence on perfection brought out the best in his players, especially the guitarists he introduced to the world through his succession of bands; Lowell George, Adrian Belew, Warren Cuccurullo and Steve Vai all cut their teeth in Zappa’s marching society.

I asked Frank about some of his protégés. “Steve Vai, for instance. Does he keep in touch with you?”

“Yeah, he comes over every once in a while.”

“How did you first meet up with him?”

“He sent me a cassette when he was 17, a student at Berklee.”

Steve Vai sums it up about FZ’s bandleader profundity in the film: “My perspective of it is when I was in it I was a tool for the composer. Whatever is in there, he uses as he deems fit. Zappa was draconian and he saw us as components in his master plan.”

A couple of years later, Vai went down to a rehearsal studio to audition. “When I went down there, he was brutal on me. I’m 20 and green and eager. He would play something on guitar and then he would say, ‘Now play it in 7/8,’ and I do it and then he says, ‘OK, now play it reggae style 7/8,’ and I do that and he says, ‘OK, now add this note... and that was impossible, not just for me but for anybody. 

“So I go, ‘I can’t do that.’ He goes [Laughs], ‘I hear Linda Ronstadt is looking for a guitar player.’

“So at the end of the rehearsal I go up to him and I say, thanks for the opportunity. I’m really sorry, I’m gonna go home now. He goes, ‘You’re in the band.’ And I hugged him. He was always cool, he was always great. I think the definition of a genius is somebody that can call into play – organically – this inspiration anytime they want, and I’ve seen Frank do this over and over again. This one time, Halloween at the Palladium in New York, Frank just played the guitar like I’ve never seen anybody in my life.”

Steve is referring to the last song of that set, a cosmic rendition of Black Napkins. I can testify to that because I was there; photographer John Livzey and I have the backstage pass to prove it. I just rewatched it on YouTube and my head is still spinning from his absolute joy of playing the guitar.

“He knew how to get the best out of people. In my case, I would test myself with things that seemed impossible to play, but which he knew I could do. He could get things from me that were unimaginable if he had not thought of them,” Vai says. “And that gave me confidence, because he was not going to ask for something I could not do well.”

I have always been an FOZ – Friend of Zappa. In my Guitar World days, I hung out with Dweezil as we rode around L.A.; I accompanied Gail Zappa and her kids one memorable night in Trancas when we saw a performance by Van Halen at a little club in the hills above Malibu; and later, as the managing editor of VJ scripts and news segments at VH1, I worked with Moon in New York. 

And John Livzey, my friend who joined me in a recent interview of Ahmet Zappa and Alex Winter, was Frank’s go-to photographer for album covers and shoots on-stage and off.

First the introductions. 

“My name is Noë Gold, founding editor of Guitar World. My story with Frank goes back to the ’60s, when I got an assignment to go to the East Village and cover this band called the Mothers of Invention. A little bit later in my career I got to do the liner notes/press package for Over-Nite Sensation. Later on when I was with Guitar World I got to come out to L.A. and sit down with Frank to talk about guitars.”

AHMET ZAPPA: “Awesome, a ton of awesomeness. All I got is, he was my dad.”

ALEX WINTER: “My journey began in the ’70s growing up with a musician brother and a predilection for cultural personalities like Zappa’s who were engaged with their art but equally engaged with the times around them. Zappa represented to my group not only a masterful musician but an artist who had a razor-sharp wit and a very astute political mind. 

“So he took a bigger place in our minds than these guitar heroes, what they could actually be. I always felt his story was so compelling outside of his musical journey. He seemed like a ripe character for a documentary.”

Gail Zappa made Winter’s wish come true six years ago, when she gave him full access to the very same vaults I visited. 

JOHN LIVZEY: “Ahmet, the period that the film traverses, I believe you were around 5 or 6. Your dad came to my studio only once in ’81 before they went on the European tour kicked off by the Halloween show. The all-night session that wound up being a cover shoot for Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar, that was in the Laurel Canyon house. I came up about midnight and I was there till about 4. We had a good time.” 

AHMET ZAPPA: “How many beers and how many packs of cigarettes did you go through?”

JOHN LIVZEY: “There weren’t any beers, but he had plenty of cigarettes and plenty of coffee. He had that coffee-plunger thing. He loved coffee.”

AHMET ZAPPA: “Tell me about it... that was my first job, making coffee.”

“I am interested in the guitar aspect,” I countered. “Did you have any discussions with people like Steve Vai about the guitar? The Strat that belonged to Jimi?”

“You can’t talk about FZ without talking about the guitar,” Ahmet says. “We’re always discovering great new music with blistering guitar solos. There will be future releases where he plays that guitar. Eddie came by to visit every now and then. He made a huge difference to my brother; that’s how I got into Van Halen – through Dweezil’s unholy fascination with that mighty group. Eddie and Frank were friendly.”

Flash back to my interview with Frank. I opened the conversation with: “Do you see a conceptual continuum between Call Any Vegetable and Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar? Or between the Mothers of Invention and The Mothers of Prevention?” – which I thought would open him up to some disquisition about needling versus noodling.

His response: “There are some links, yeah. The main drawback of the medium I’m working in is, until I got the computer, I was locked into making music based on the assets and/or liabilities of the guys in the band. In other words, if you want to write something that’s faster than what the guys can play, you can’t hear it, because they can’t play it that fast. But now that I can do it with a computer, that’s not a problem anymore.” 

In other words, the master was doing a lot of tapping, but not on any guitar neck. With the synclavier, his new-found instrument of choice, he said, “I can enter information with the octapad; you can take a completely improvised line and build an entire composition out of it. 

“You see, it’s still a single line. But with this, you can improvise a single line and have that line being played by a whole ensemble of instruments and actually have those instruments play that line in harmony.”

“What is all that activity doing to your guitar playing, per se?” I asked.

“Haven’t touched it in two years. I don’t even have the calluses on my fingertips.” 

There was a brief pause as the interviewers collected what was left of their minds from the floor. Then he took us down into the vaults, the vast collection of tapes, reels and canisters filled with every single piece of music he had ever created.

“Here’s Eric Clapton when he came over to my house,” he said. And as to the reams of tape with blistering solos we were digging through in those vaults, since they seemed to be popular, he fully intended to release them over time – which the family has done faithfully over the years. And the guitar solos that punctuated his best work?

“Well, look at it this way: I got plenty of tapes of these things. I can release another guitar solo album. And, when you see what the guitar solo has been reduced to in contemporary music, it’s like an eight-bar fill. And during that fill, you’re supposed to play every hammer-on lick that you know as fast as you can play it, followed by 15 feedback noises and then get the fuck out of there. You know, that’s what the guitar solo has been reduced to, and that’s not the medium I’ve ever worked in.”

“But the actual playing – you don’t miss it at all? Because I – and a lot of our readers – love your guitar sound. To me that always meant your personal voice within whatever music we were hearing. When you hit the guitar solo, it was not precise at all. It was something transcendent, something out.”

“Every once in a while, I miss it,” he says, noting again that he’s lost the blisters on his fingers. [Zappa sits back in his chair, letting this one sink in.] But I don’t play a style that is contemporary, you know? I don’t do all the 1980s guitar noises. If you don’t sound like Eddie Van Halen, then apparently you don’t actually play guitar anymore – the current audience would listen to it and go, ‘That’s not a guitar. It doesn’t go ‘wee wee wee wee, wee wee wee wee.’ So why do it?”

“Dweezil would probably rebut that,” I say, “what with his own infatuation for Eddie Van Halen – and he is on MTV.” 

“Well, I can’t help the way he looks. And he chooses his own wardrobe, but the fact of the matter is that Dweezil can actually play an instrument.”

“So that’s a fluke, according to your theory of how musicians make it these days.”

“Yeah, yeah. Uh, he’s a mutation. I’m not saying anything against Eddie because I think what he’s done for the guitar is wonderful. But the thing that’s tragic about the marketplace is that everybody decided that they were all going to do that, and then the competition is not musical. 

“It’s gymnastic. Okay, they say, ‘I want to sound like Eddie, but in order to be better than Eddie I have to be faster than Eddie.’ Meanwhile, Edward probably sits back and goes, ‘These guys are really stupid.’ Because I don’t think that’s what he had in mind when he developed the style.

“The problem is, most of the best stuff I will physically be able to do on the guitar is already on tape. You just haven’t heard it yet. I mean, I don’t have much incentive to play it. I can still think guitar. But to physically manipulate it, I would have to go back in and woodshed for months on end just to be able to do it. Dweezil practices non-stop, day in, day out,” he says.

“I recall you saying once that the hardest thing to accomplish in a guitar solo is to come up with a distinct melody within that solo. When you’re working with the Synclavier, and you get to a point where in the old days you were thinking about composing for the guitar as well, what do you do at that juncture? Do you put a coda-type thing in there?”

“It would be difficult to talk about what I’m doing over there since you don’t know what it is. I should just stop the tape and go over there and show you what I’m doing.”

[Stops tape and we get a demo of Frank composing on the Synclavier. He taps out a few seemingly random rhythms, makes some observations of the CRT screen and manipulates parameters of music around the “random rhythms”. The music coming out of the Synclavier is many-faceted, but typical Zappa, with percussive, marimba-esque runs and odd cat growls prancing about together.]

“That sounds like your music. Same guy.”

“Are you familiar with the piece on the Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar album called While You Were Out?’” he says. “Well, on the new album [Jazz from Hell, 1986] there’s a deluxe computer version of that [While You Were Art II]. But it’s not played by a guitar. I look at that thing – the recording console – and it’s like a musical instrument, if you use it the right way. You’ve gotta start with a musical idea. if it’s not a musical idea, what is it? An equation?” 

“How do you get that? How do you start? Do you have entire complicated things full-blown that spring out of your brain, or do you start with something small and you build it up?”

“Sometimes I have a complete vision of what the thing is, and it’s just drudgery to go in there and execute the vision, and if you like it you save ’em and make a piece on it, and if you don’t you throw it away.”

Again, the interviewers have to pick up their splattered brains from the floor. “How do you keep track of everything? On each floppy, there’s like a million things –” 

“Aaah! Then you have to have a good memory.”

“Yet, when we first started talking, we discussed guitar noisemakers and these devices that you seem to have a fondness for – the Green Ringers and the Uni-Vibes and such. Things that give that idiosyncratic, anarchic tone.”

“Well, I like the sound of a guitar. My idea of the best use of a guitar is something that’s personal... not necessarily commercially viable. There are things I like to hear coming out of a guitar. But that’s my personal taste.”

“The Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar series. How did the three records do commercially?”

“Real good, as a matter of fact,” he counters. “And it surprised the shit out of a lot of people. When it was first released, there were 30,000 units of that three-record box sold in France alone. It’s done well and it’s still selling.”

Again, I ask him about getting out of the house. “Do you have any urge to play at all in public anymore?”

“I’d have to have an awful good reason, and in order to play in public I’d have to learn how to play the guitar again – literally. I couldn’t bend the strings.”

“It’s weird because we’re from a guitar magazine and you’re not really into playing guitar anymore.”

“What’s that got to do with releasing guitar records? As I told you, there’s plenty of stuff on tape. I can play you some stuff – examples of what’s lurking in the archives. One thing I always hated to do was play guitar in a studio. I always thought it was an incredibly boring experience. 

“Like playing in a vacuum, isn’t it? So therefore, in order to really play guitar, you’ve got to hire a band, and that becomes cumbersome. And I guess nobody’s going to want to audition just to be in Frank’s backup band, just so Frank can play guitar. If it’s not necessarily going to go on a record or something. It’s the law of supply and demand, you know? There ya go.”

And that is how I wound up working with Frank Zappa on The Guitar World According to Frank Zappa. 

• Adapted from Conversations with Rock Stars, coming soon from a major publisher. 

The entirety of Frank Zappa and the Mothers' legendary June 1971 run at New York City's Fillmore East will be released on a massive new 8-CD box set, The Mothers 1971.

Set for a March 18 release via Zappa Records/UMe, the collection notably features Zappa's June 6, 1971 encore jam at the Fillmore with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was produced by Ahmet Zappa and Zappa archivist Joe Travers.

The Mothers 1971 also contains Zappa's infamous December 10, 1971 show at the Rainbow Theatre in London, during which – after a rendition of The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand – Zappa was attacked by a deranged fan, suffering serious injuries that left him wheelchair-bound for almost a year. 

Back in 1971, Zappa hastily culled the best of the Fillmore performances for the live album, Fillmore East – June 1971. That album has also – in tandem with The Mothers 1971 – been separately re-mixed and remastered for a 3LP deluxe reissue.

The 12/10/1971 Rainbow Theatre set has also been given a separate, 3LP deluxe vinyl reissue, with a brand-new mix and liner notes by Eddie Kramer.

The Rainbow Theatre performance would turn out to be the last to feature the Mark II Mothers lineup of Ian Underwood on winds and keyboards, Aynsley Dunbar on drums, Jim Pons on bass, Bob Harris on keyboards and backing vocals, and Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (aka Flo & Eddie of The Turtles) on vocals/dialog.

Also included in The Mothers 1971 is the Tears Began To Fall/Junier Mintz Boogie single, and a previously unreleased "hybrid concert" of sorts, culled from the band's June 1 and June 3, 1971 performances in Scranton and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The box set also comes with a 68-page booklet featuring an in-depth interview with Underwood (conducted by Ahmet Zappa,) plus notes from Kramer and Pons, tape-by-tape liner notes from Travers, and photos by Henry Diltz.

You can check out The Mothers 1971's cover art above, and preorder the album via Zappa's website.

Along with its cousin the Les Paul, as well as Fender's Stratocaster and Telecaster, the Gibson SG arguably rounds out the big four of classic electric guitars. It's lent power, brawn and sonic versatility to countless vital long-players in the six decades since its introduction. 

Narrowing things down to just the 10 best of these innumerable SG-powered albums is a near-impossible task, but it does help chart rock's dizzying evolution, particularly in the 60s and 70s.

From AC/DC's rabble-rousing debut to Sister Rosetta Tharpe's stunning Live In Paris 1964, the following albums all – with an SG leading the charge – made a tremendous impact on music in their own way.

1. AC/DC – High Voltage (1976)

AC/DC’s first proper release also featured Angus Young’s first SG, a 1970 model (‘probably’, says Angus himself) bought that same year. It was used exclusively throughout most of the 70s – and even on 2020’s Power Up. High Voltage was famously slammed by Rolling Stone magazine, but it’s hard to argue with its energy and the quality of material and performances.  

Standout track: T.N.T.

2. Cream – Disraeli Gears (1967)

Fair enough, Cream’s second effort isn’t considered the most consistent record, but when it got it right it absolutely shone – and Clapton’s spellbinding playing on his 1964 ‘Fool’ Gibson SG is all over it. Plus it also goes down in history for introducing Clapton’s coveted ‘woman’ tone; just check out the opening riff to Sunshine Of Your Love.  

Standout track: Sunshine Of Your Love 

3. Black Sabbath – Paranoid (1970) 

Left-handed riff king Tony Iommi is responsible for many teens purchasing SG guitars (and rupturing their own eardrums). His band’s second album continued the band’s eponymous debut’s theme of a dark and heavy low sound, and is considered a benchmark in heavy metal music. The title track is key, but War Pigs is a standout, too.  

Standout track: War Pigs

4. The Allman Brothers Band – Hittin’ The Note (2003)

Duane Allman is a crucial player in the SG canon, as is Derek Trucks, whose clear and precise blues sound is revered the world over. Hittin’ The Note is especially notable here since it’s the final Allman Brothers Band album and the only one to feature Trucks. His mellow juicy lines work well with Warren Haynes’ guitar work on an enjoyable and solid record.  

Standout track: Instrumental Illness

5. The Beatles – Revolver (1966)

The hints of experimentalism heard on the previous year’s Rubber Soul went on to be further realized on 1966’s Revolver. For the studio sessions, George Harrison relied heavily on his 1964 Gibson SG Standard, which he later gave to Pete Ham of Badfinger. The tone achieved on the track She Said She Said is just stunning.  

Standout track: She Said She Said

6. The Doors – L.A. Woman (1971)

The last studio album to feature Jim Morrison at the helm, the Doors’ sixth studio release was also a return to a stripped-back, more bluesy sound for the California band – and what a resounding success it was too. Robby Krieger’s 1968 SG Standard features throughout, but really starts hitting its stride when the cracking Been Down So Long kicks in.   

Standout track: Been Down So Long

7. Frank Zappa & The Mothers – Roxy & Elsewhere (1974)

Zappa’s ‘Baby Snakes’ SG of the late 70s was actually an obscure custom copy, but the ‘Roxy’ model he used for this album was a Gibson, albeit modified with various switches and preamps. His son Dweezil has since stated that Frank’s tone is impossible to emulate; and even the briefest of listens to this rollercoaster album will back that claim.   

Standout track: Cheepnis

8. Haim – Days Are Gone (2013)

Danielle Haim has quickly become a modern icon for the SG, and this tightly performed, highly listenable, well-produced debut album from her LA band is chock-full of spikey, accomplished pop songs, with Danielle’s jagged picking on her 2005 Cherry Red Standard a key element. Check out live footage of the band for the full experience.   

Standout track: Falling

9. The Who – Live At Leeds (1970) 

Live At Leeds is well up there with the best ever live rock albums, and it’s also a cracking example of the power of the SG. Just hear Pete Townshend’s fretboard-surfing during My Generation for unquestionable proof of its muscle. And talking of strength, the modified SG in question is also famous for surviving being smashed to smithereens on stage.   

Standout track: My Generation

10. Sister Rosetta Tharpe – Live In Paris 1964 (1988)

This remarkable guitarist has been cited as a key influence for many a star player over the years, including Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. Later in her career, the good sister acquired her classic white early 60s SG model, which bore the ‘Les Paul Custom’ nameplate (which subsequently disappeared at the end of ’63) and was showcased well in this live set.  

Standout track: This Train

This extract was taken from an exclusive interview Zappa did with Guitarist in March 1993 and offers some insight into his playing as well as some of the gear that passed through his hands during his spectacularly leftfield career.

Tell us about your first ever guitar.

“It didn’t have a make on it – it had been kinda sandblasted. My brother got it for $1.50 at an auction and it was an archtop, f-hole, ugly motherfucker with the strings about a half-inch off the fingerboard.

“My father had a guitar, which he kept in a closet, but I didn’t really decide to mess around with the thing until we got this godawful thing at the auction. That’s why I liked it, because it was so tinny-sounding. It was just an acoustic guitar, but for an acoustic instrument it was moving closer to the direction of that wiry tone I liked with Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, especially if you picked it right next to the bridge.” 

When did you make the move to electric? 

“The guitar my father had was a round-holed guitar of anonymous make and I stuck one of those DeArmond soundhole pickups in that. So it would be one of those bad-sounding magnetic pickups that you stick in the soundhole of a normal acoustic guitar, so it wasn’t a real electric guitar. I guess it was around four or five years later that I actually got an electric guitar. There was a music store not far from my house and I rented this Telecaster for $15 a month. Eventually, I had to give it back because I couldn’t make the payments on it any more.” 

How would you sum up your guitar style on the early Mothers recordings? 

“It was okay, but back then the guitar wasn’t a featured instrument in the way it was on the later albums. As far as a precedent for it, I don’t think there was anything you could compare it to; it was the only way I knew how to do it. There was no reason to do it another way – and, anyway, everybody else was doing it the other way.”

The rock guitar influences that are the most common are the '60s icons, players like Clapton and Hendrix… 

“When Freak Out! [1966] and Absolutely Free [1967] were done, there wasn’t any Hendrix. We met Hendrix in the summer of ’67; he sat in with us at the Garrick Theatre, so we’d already made those albums before I even knew that he existed. Actually, I think my playing is probably more derived from the folk music records that I heard – Middle Eastern music, Indian music, stuff like that.”

What specifically?

“For years I had something called Music On The Desert Road [Deben Bhattacharya], which was a recording of all kinds of different ethnic musics from different places in the Middle East. I used to listen to that all the time – I liked that kind of melodic feel. I listened to Indian music, Ravi Shankar and so forth, before we did the Freak Out! album. The idea of creating melody from scratch based on an ostinato or single chord that doesn’t change, that was the world that I felt most comfortable with.

“If you listen to Indian classical music, it’s not just pentatonic. Some of the ragas that they use are very chromatic, all sustained over a root and a 5th that doesn’t change, and by using these chromatic scales they can imply all these other kinds of harmonies. The chords don’t change; it’s just the listener’s aspect that gets to change based on how the melody notes are driven against the ground bass.”

That sounds like a parallel with your own guitar improvisations, where the band plays a fairly straightforward rhythmic vamp and you insert dissonance via the solo – you use a lot of chromatic tones and whole tone scales in your solos. 

“Well, you stick them in where you think they belong when you think they belong. Sometimes you guess right, sometimes you guess wrong. The most dangerous thing is improvising with a band and thinking, ‘Okay, now’s the time to play that diminished scale,’ and somebody in the band is thinking, ‘Now’s the time to play a major chord.’ Those kinds of accidents do happen…” 

Your guitar style underwent a marked change around the time of Over-Nite Sensation. 

“That was partly because of the rhythm section and partly because of the equipment I was using. I imagine that anybody’s guitar playing would change if one day your keyboard player was Don Preston and suddenly the next day it’s George Duke – know what I mean? Or the difference between [drummers] Jimmy Carl Black and Chester Thompson; that certainly made a difference. 

"When you have a completely different rhythm section with a different musical perspective, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. It also changed because I started playing an SG.”

So, you could put the difference in your guitar sound down, at least in part, to a new instrument? 

“Not just a different instrument but also different amplification because prior to that time I’d been playing either a Gold Top Les Paul or a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster, which was a large, fat three-pickup jazz guitar, which really had uncontrollable feedback. 

"I was playing through a Fender amp or an Acoustic amp with a fairly nondescript tone – I just didn’t have enough money to invest in new equipment. But by the early '70s I was playing this SG and I switched over to Marshalls, and started playing through a device that a friend built for me, which had compression, phase shifting and some other little specialities.” 

How did you come to own the fire-damaged ex-Jimi Hendrix Strat?

“There was this guy Howard Parker – they called him ‘H’ – who was Hendrix’s roadie, gofer and general assistant. He stayed at our house for a couple of months in the late '60s, and he had this guitar which Hendrix had given to him – I thought it was from the Miami concert. He gave it to me and we had it hanging on the wall as a decoration for years and years and then I met some guys who were capable of putting guitars back together, so I had it done.”

Does it have an individual sound?

“Yes, it did have a sound all its own, especially after it was reconstructed, but that sound was not what you would expect from the Hendrix guitar. It didn’t sound like all the Hendrix guitar solos you’ve ever heard.”

It’s had pickup transformations as well, hasn’t it? 

“Yeah, it used to have a chrome scratchplate and it had, I think, at that time a Barcus Berry in the neck and also a preamp…”

Steve Vai started working for Zappa at the age of 18. In the beginning he was transcribing Zappa’s music, some of which was published in The Frank Zappa Guitar Book (Munchkin Music, 1982), but in the autumn of 1980 he became a fully paid-up member of Zappa’s recording and touring band and can still remember the level of culture shock that was to ensue…

How did you get to know Zappa?

“I was so innocent and naïve. I was a kid that grew up in a teenage bedroom on Long Island listening to the progressive rock music of the 70s, but had an interest in composition from a very early age. And I discovered Frank. When I moved out to California, it was a bit of a shock. It was so exciting and so interesting. And then I got an apartment right down the street from Frank, so I was constantly in the Zappa world. A week later, I just started going up to the house and then that was it, you know?”

Did you go straight into recording sessions?

“Well, that’s the interesting thing about Frank. When you go up to the studio and you’re a musician and there’s something that you can do that he finds useful in his music, you just start recording all sorts of things. Then records start coming out and sometimes they’re not necessarily in the order that you worked on things. 

“So, for instance, when I first started going up to the house, Frank had me recording a few pieces of music that were extremely difficult. One of them was Theme From The 3rd Movement Of Sinister Footwear. 

“Then the first album I started to record with Frank was You Are What You Is. I was all over that record and I thought, ‘Well, great, that’s going to be the next record that comes out.’ But the next record that actually came out was Tinseltown Rebellion, which was from the first fall 1980 tour that I did. And then You Are What You Is came out after that. So you just never knew with Frank.” 

He was renowned for being very tough in the rehearsal room. Did you experience that? 

“The level of excellence that you needed to be at was such that if you didn’t have the goods, you didn’t last. And Frank expected everybody to rise to the occasion. One of the brilliant things about Frank was he had the ability to totally intuitively read your potential. And each musician that he hired for his band had to have something that they could do that was somewhat extraordinary. 

“You had to be a great singer or a great player, whatever it was that you did. That’s what he expected from you. He wouldn’t expect you to do things that you couldn’t do because that wouldn’t work for him. So it didn’t work for you. So ‘tough’ is an interesting word to apply to Frank. He was demanding, but he didn’t demand things that you couldn’t do.”

Personally, what do you feel he drew out of you as a musician?

“Well, first I transcribed his music so he put me in really deep, transcribing all these abstract guitar solos and drum parts for him. For some reason, this was something that was just very organic for me. And then, as far as playing obtuse melodies on the guitar that aren’t very natural for conventional guitar players, I was pretty good at that because in my mind I loved the idea of playing things that were very, very difficult – and Frank had a boatload of that stuff. So he would write music for an instrument like the piano that wouldn’t fall on the guitar in any natural way, but I somehow figured out ways to play it. 

“One of the things I was able to do, which I think Frank was able to take advantage of, was play some of those very difficult melodies that in the past he didn’t have guitar players play.”

You played on possibly the most technically difficult of all Zappa’s pieces, The Black Page, earning you the title of ‘Stunt Guitarist’ in the band. 

“I think he was just interested to see how far he could take me with playing crazy stuff on the guitar. But the things that I did with him that I think he got the biggest kick out of was The Jazz Discharge Party Hats or The Dangerous Kitchen or Moggio or RDNZL or Drowning Witch. These are all pieces of music that just had an uncanny type of guitar expectations.”

Is there a moment on stage that will stay with you for ever, during your time touring with Frank?

“There are so many. The first show of the tour I did with Frank in 1980, he’d never really had somebody playing these types of melodies on the guitar. He had given me the melody to this song, Montana, and now you get guys like Mike Keneally and Dweezil [Zappa] and that’s a piece of cake.

“It’s not a problem for these guys, but back then nobody was doing that stuff. And I’ve seen Frank in a bad mood. If he heard one mistake, one tiny little mistake, something he didn’t like, he threw the whole song out. And if it’s the same person who made the mistake more than two times in a row, they were thrown out of the band. 

“Well, we play Montana and there’s that interlude in the middle and I just nailed it, you know? I just freakin’ nailed it. And he stopped the show, walks up to me in front of the audience and he says to the mic, ‘Not bad, sport.’ And then we kick in again. Now, I’ve seen him stop the band for other reasons that weren’t as friendly as that, trust me. So that was a surprise.”

• Steve Vai reflects on his role in Crossroads: “The guitar duel was energetic and well laid out – kids responded to that”

It’s amazing to think that the guitar isn’t Mike Keneally’s first instrument. He originally approached Zappa to audition for keyboards, but finding that role already filled he decided to go for the guitar position instead. 

Having proved to Frank that he could handle the most complex music thrown his way, Mike joined Zappa’s band for the 1988 tour.

When you first started the tour, how did you manage the leap from keyboard to guitar?

“I quickly had get up to speed. It’s not just executing notes on an instrument, which was kind of the way I approached it at the time, because as a keyboardist initially, I sort of conceptualise the fretboard as just like a different version of a keyboard. 

“So for me to play guitar with Frank at that time was like 90 per cent about executing parts and not really getting into the way personality can be conveyed with a guitar. If you listen to what I play on those on those live recordings from 1988, it’s much more about being an ensemble member.”

Another startling fact about your tenure with Zappa was that it was your first pro gig.

“I had done such a small amount of playing with large bands, or any kind of live playing on a large scale at all, I had to come to terms with everything at once. So if I could just cut the parts in some form on the guitar, I consider that a success. 

“If it were possible to go back and do those shows again with some portion of the knowledge I have now about guitar playing specifically, things would come off differently but not necessarily better!”

Your in-depth knowledge of Zappa’s back catalogue proved to be invaluable during rehearsals, didn’t it? 

“If Frank wanted to play some song that he hadn’t played in a long time, he might say, ‘We haven’t played Who Needs The Peace Corps? for 20 years,’ and then he would just turn and look at me and I’d start playing it. So the fact that I was able to provide that service I think is more valuable to what was accomplished on that tour musically than anything specifically about guitar. 

“Although I got lucky on occasion with some of the guitar playing. There are some nice moments on the [live] albums, but it’s certainly nothing compared to what Steve [Vai] had going on in terms of the impact that he made as a guitarist.”

Zappa was famous for a putting his bands through a punishing pre-tour rehearsal schedule. What was that like?

“Heaven! Because I personally couldn’t imagine anything that I would rather spend the day doing than playing Zappa music. You’ve got to realise that I came from more of a fan perspective than a lot of guys who would get in the band, where it really would just be tiring grunt work. 

“But not only was I a huge Zappa fan, it was also my first professional music experience of any kind. So my mind was being blown on a daily basis, eight hours a day, five days a week for four months of pretty much sustained bliss. 

“33 years later, I can look back and understand why somebody might get fatigued. I’m a lot more sympathetic to that, but I still think, ‘You know what? What a blessed situation to be in,’ and that overrides anything else. There aren’t that many times in life where you can say, ‘I’m in rehearsal with Frank Zappa, playing his music.’”

What was the most demanding piece that you had to learn for the ’88 tour? 

“The first one that comes to mind is Alien Orifice because there’s a long patch in the middle that actually wasn’t even played by guitar on the original recording, but Frank decided he wanted to change up the orchestration. 

“It was just a barrage of fast 16th notes and he wanted it to be clean, bassy-sounding guitar, played along with the vibraphone and piano. So I just had to learn this thing and it is the type of part that you just have to drill it and drill it and drill it, and you can’t afford to think about it. It has to be complete muscle memory. Giving an ounce of energy to what the next note is supposed to be, you’re going to lose it. 

“Bob Rice, who was the Synclavier tech on that tour, would keep a running tally on my executions of that song and any time I did okay, he would come up after the show and go, ‘Nice Alien.’ That was the only thing that was in the back of my mind: trying to elicit a ‘Nice Alien’ from Bob Rice after the show.”

How did the experience of such intense rehearsing translate into actually getting on tour and playing the material live?

“There were certain songs that we drilled constantly while we were rehearsing in Los Angeles. I’m thinking in particular of a song called Jezebel Boy, which is not anything that requires rehearsal except for the fact that it involved a certain amount of improvised vocal stuff. And I think Frank just liked playing it. We’d get back from dinner break and Frank would say, ‘Jezebel Boy’, just because he enjoyed it. He and I could get into different improvised stuff every time we played it. 

“On the road, we played it one time. We fucked it up. And that’s the version that’s on Broadway The Hard Way, because it was the only version that Frank had to choose from. But I just thought, ‘How strange that we played this song relentlessly in rehearsal.’”

What would be your most memorable moment from the tour?

“I used to dream of playing in Frank’s band, so the fact that it was finally happening, I opted to just be grateful for it. The night before the tour started, I was panicking because I’d never done anything like it. I was home, unable to sleep, thinking that even though I’d just rehearsed for four months, I didn’t feel like I belonged – I felt unworthy somehow. 

“Frank may have sensed something about what I was going through because on the first show in Albany, New York, he kept going to me in the second set and having me do things, improvise on guitar and vocal and keyboard simultaneously, you know, all this stuff. 

"And when we came out for the encore Frank says, ‘Mike Keneally, ladies and gentlemen!’ and I was feeling like I belonged there and apparently Frank felt the same way, so I felt really validated from that moment and for the rest of the tour I just relished every opportunity to perform.”

The director of exhaustive Frank Zappa documentary, Zappa, Alex Winter, is probably better known to the world as Bill S Preston, Esq from the Bill & Ted movies.

Zappa was a labour of love that took years to complete, and two key elements to its existence were a successful fundraising campaign and, more crucially, unlimited access to Zappa’s infamous vault – an enormous autobiographical archive of film, video and audio.

Here, the lifelong Zappa fan takes us through the making of the revealing portrait. 

How did you begin your work with the archives?

“Access to the vault began a two-year process of doing excavation and preservation work on the media that was down there before we even got around to being able to make the film. It was a mammoth undertaking. Thankfully, it’s media that we were really happy to be looking at. Every day we were looking at stuff, which was kind of a joy.”

A lot of the material had deteriorated over the years. How did you go about restoring it?

“Zappa was such a formidable archivist and he was working in every format. So we had 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, 35mm and every conceivable format of video and audio. It was deteriorated, but we had over a dozen separate companies scattered across the place doing this work for us. It took a great deal of time, but, again, it was gratifying that the media was really beautiful, so we were happy to do it.

“It was just not easy. The audio is very delicate. It’ll get eaten away at by time. The family had it in a temperature-controlled space, but it’s very hard for that stuff to survive no matter what. So we were able to save all of the endangered media that was down there. Some of it was already gone, but very little of it.”

It must have been a mammoth task deciding what material to select from such a large resource. How did you go about that?

“I had an idea in mind from the beginning in terms of the story I was most interested in, and not trying to please every fan and hit every biographical beat of his life. I was really interested in a narrative of what it meant to make art in that period of time and the politics of the time and the culture of the time. 

“I think what helped direct Mike [J Nichols, film editor] and I specifically was that quite early on in the preservation work we discovered hours and hours of Frank talking, whether it was on film, video or audio. And we pulled all of that. The lion’s share of that had never been heard before and we strung together a narrative of essentially Frank taking us through his life. And then we chose what to use and what not to use.”

Was there anything missing from the archive that you wished you’d been able to include in the film? 

“I was eager to include the Garrick Theater period, which is one of the most inspiring periods of Zappa’s career, in my opinion, because it was really such a unique way of forming an artistic identity to just walk into a theatre and perform there all day, every day for months on end. And I think he really came out from that experience having formed his artistic identity. There was always stuff we wanted that we couldn’t find. But I mean, time ravages all things, you know?” 

• Zappa is available to watch on Altitude.film and other major digital platforms.

Never ones to settle in their ways, the generation-defining pop-rock rulers in Weezer have crafted not one, but two of their most unpredictably wild albums to date: the equally introspective and operatic OK Human (which features not a single lick of electric guitar, but instead makes use of a 38-piece orchestra), and the '80s hair metal-channelling Van Weezer (which is absolutely stuffed from cover to cover with rip-roaring riffs and soaring solos). To find out how these two boundary-breaking albums came to life, Australian Guitar caught up with frontman Rivers Cuomo – who also filled us in on Weezer's notably ambitious plan for 2022, which includes an epic four-album saga!

Before you dive into that wicked five-page cover story, though, why not catch up on all the latest happenings in the Australian rock world? In Australian Guitar #143, we're showcasing You Am I, DZ Deathrays, Polish Club, The Bamboos, Liz Stringer and Teenage Joans, all of whom have ripping new records they wax lyrical about with us. And from across the pond, we've got interviews with St. Vincent, Garbage, Dinosaur Jr, Wolf Alice, Manchester Orchestra, Royal Blood and Gojira – to name just a few.

We also got down to the wire with Pearl Jam shredder Mike McCready to chat about his stunning new signature Stratocaster from the Fender Custom Shop; then stepped behind the curtain with one of the actual master builders from the Custom Shop – the legendary Kyle McMillin – to hear the backstory behind his jaw-dropping inclusion in the 2021 Fender Prestige Collection.

Speaking of iconic guitar brands doing super cool things, we get a blast from the past with a story detailing how Gibson saved Epiphone from the brink of death in the '50s. Epiphone, of course, are best known for making the best guitars a future virtuoso could dream of getting their hands on – and for those budding players among us ready to shred up a storm, we've got five essential lessons for you to give a red hot go. Once you've got the technique down, learn some classic rock anthems with our trio of tablature highlights: "Lithium" by Nirvana, "Tangerine" by Led Zeppelin and "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop.

But what if you don't want an Epiphone? What about one of the most beloved guitars of all time – the one and only Fender Stratocaster – instead? There are literally hundreds of Stratocaster models on the market, but never fear! In AG #143, we're diving deep with shootout of the best Strats you can buy right now. We'd suggest checking that feature out while you revisit the mammoth prog epic that is Tool's latest album, Fear Inoculum – then read all about how its producer, Joe Barresi, managed to capture that one-of-a-kind guitar tone in this issue's Producer Profile column.

After that, suss the Fresh Frets column to find your new favourite local band, and the Spotlight column to catch up with some of the buzziest names on the scene right now. There's also the Hot Gear column hated by wallets everywhere – and once you've drooled over all the goodies in that, head to the last pages of the magazine for a stack of reviews for the latest and greatest gear on the market.

Australian Guitar #143 is available from today at newsagents all around the country, and online via techmags.com.au or iSubscribe.

Artist interviews in this issue:

• The Bamboos
• Dropkick Murphys
• DZ Deathrays
• Garbage
• Gojira
• K.Flay
• Manchester Orchestra
• Mannequin Pussy
• The Offspring
• Pearl Jam
• Polish Club
• Rag'N'Bone Man
• Royal Blood
• St. Vincent
• Teenage Fanclub
• Teenage Joans
• Waterparks
• Weezer
• You Am I
• Joe Barresi (Producer Profile)
• Aston Valladares of Towns (Spotlight)
• Christopher Vernon of Belle Haven (Spotlight)
• Rosie Tucker (Spotlight)
• Tyne-James Organ (Spotlight)

All the hottest gear reviews:

• CME WIDI Master
• Focusrite FAST Series Plugins
• Sterling By Music Man Jason Richardson 7-String Cutlass
• Line 6 HX Stomp XL
• Fender American Acoustasonic Jazzmaster
• Cort G300 Pro
• Epiphone Inspired By Gibson J-45 + J-200
• Electro-Harmonix Oceans 12 Dual Stereo Reverb
• Victory V40 The Duchess
• Carl Martin Plexiranger
• MXR M251 FOD Drive
• MXR M305 Tremolo
• MXR M299 Carbon Copy Mini
• Boss GT-1000Core
• Boss Pocket GT
• Blackstar Carry-On Deluxe Pack
• PRS SE Custom 24 + 24-08 

Subscribe to the print edition of Australian Guitar, and you'll enjoy each new issue on the day it's published, delivered straight to your door. Click here for all the details!

Frank Zappa's last ever show – which he played with his 11-piece band at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York on March 25, 1988 – will be released as a new live album, Zappa ’88: The Last U.S. Show.

Arriving via Zappa Records/UMC on June 18, the live album is the first posthumous archival release from Zappa's ‘88 touring band, and features 29 unreleased performances including two additional ones from the same tour. 

They are Zappa's rendition of the Allman Brothers Band's Whipping Post from a show in Providence, Rhode Island on March 16, and a version of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven from the band's show at March 23 show in Towson, Maryland.

The album will also feature the first official release of Zappa's much-talked-about The Beatles Medley, as well as a performance of I Ain't Got No Heart – taken from The Mothers of Invention's debut album Freak Out! You can listen to that below.

The show itself was recorded using two Sony PCM-3324 DASH 24 track tape recorders synced together using a Lynx Time Code Module, and have been mixed by engineer Craig Parker Adams.

In terms of format, the album will be released digitally, on 2CD and as a 4LP vinyl box. Variants of the latter include black and purple vinyl discs. The physical formats include detailed liner notes by Zappa Vaultmeister Joe Travers and Zappa ’88 drummer Chad Wackerman, as well as photos from the tour.

Shortly after the show at the Nassau Coliseum, Zappa's band headed to Europe for a string of shows, but split up during the run. At the time, no-one knew the show would be Zappa's last in the US.

Check out the tracklisting for Zappa ’88: The Last U.S. Show below.

Disc 1

1. “We Are Doing Voter Registration Here”
2. The Black Page (New Age Version)
3. I Ain’t Got No Heart
4. Love Of My Life
5. Inca Roads
6. Sharleena
7. Who Needs The Peace Corps?
8. I Left My Heart In San Francisco
9. Dickie’s Such An Asshole
10. When The Lie’s So Big
11. Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk
12. Sofa #1
13. One Man, One Vote
14. Happy Birthday, Chad!
15. Packard Goose Pt. 1
16. Royal March From “L’Histoire Du Soldat”
17. Theme From The Bartok Piano Concerto #3
18. Packard Goose Pt. II
19. The Torture Never Stops Pt. I
20. Theme From “Bonanza”

Disc 2

1. Lonesome Cowboy Burt
2. The Torture Never Stops Pt. II
3. City Of Tiny Lites
4. Pound For A Brown
5. The Beatles Medley
6. Peaches En Regalia
7. Stairway To Heaven
8. I Am The Walrus
9. Whipping Post
10. Bolero
11. America The Beautiful

Steve Vai has achieved legendary status in the guitar world over the course of his 40-year-plus career, but that's not to say he hasn't received his share of criticism along the way.

In a new interview with Australian Musician, Vai recalls his tenure in Frank Zappa's band – which spanned 1980 to 1983 – and remembers how the late musician described the sound of his early guitar tone as “like an electric ham sandwich”.

In response to a question regarding the gear he used with Zappa, and whether Zappa cared about the equipment his band used, Vai replies, “It had to sound a particular way.”

“I used my Strat that I got when I was a kid for pretty much the whole thing. I only had one guitar. But then I got another guitar as a backup – I used Frank's Hendrix Strat as a backup, in case if I broke a string or something he let me use that.

“I'd use it a bunch of times – I used it on Zomby Woof every night but I was very inexperienced when it came to tone because I never could afford a good amplifier, I gave precious little attention to tone.

• Steve Vai: Frank Zappa's advice saved me literally millions of dollars

He continues, “I remember after the first show that I ever did with Frank, I met him in the restaurant of the hotel in the morning and having breakfast, and I said, ‘So, how was I?’

“And he said to me, ‘You know, Steve, I think you're a really good musician but your tone sounds like an electric ham sandwich.’ And I said, ‘Well why? I mean, I've got the Strat, I've got the Marshall...’

“So he said, ‘The sound isn't in the amps, it's in your head.’ Now, at first, I didn't know what he meant by that, I thought it was just some esoteric cool thing to say. But it wasn't until a little later on that I realized - yeah, that's exactly where your tone is!

“It cannot be any other place, it's gonna sound the way you're expecting it to sound. It's kind of hard to explain. And then you'll manipulate it to get it to where you want it to sound.

“But I gave very little attention to that. But I gave little attention to a lot of things until I joined Frank's band and then I focused intensely on various things through his tutelage."

Elsewhere in the interview, Vai remembers Zappa's approach to his live shows. “Frank Zappa never did the same show,” he says. “We had about 80 songs that we had to know which was death-defying, and he would write the setlist right before we went on stage every night.

“It was different every night and you just never knew what he was gonna do. I'd forget there was an audience because you have to [have] the bulletproof focus on Frank at all times. And he heard everything!”

Vai continues, “He was very critical because he was always trying to improve it. And he heard everything but I think at times you can tell... I think what he enjoyed the most was the actual compositional process...

“For most of the rehearsals, Frank was just building, changing, laughing... He'd do things to laugh at you, it was just fantastic. I guess probably his biggest obstacle was the limitations of the musicians because he would always try to get them to go further.

“But the brilliant thing about Frank was his ability to see your potential and to pull it out of you, in a setting that was unique because most of the musicians that I even knew that worked with Frank, you have to have something that he could use as a color in his musical creative palette.

“And I had something - the thing that I had was for some reason I was able to play these weird melodies and stuff on the guitar, so I was a good ingredient. I think he enjoyed the creative process more than just the listening.”

The following is an excerpt from the February 1999 issue of Guitar World.

“There’s no single ideal listener out there who likes my orchestral music, my guitar albums and songs like Dyna-Moe-Hum,” Frank Zappa told me in 1988. “That’s why sometimes I’ll do an orchestral album, and the people who like guitar stuff can’t stand it. And then a guitar album comes out, and the people who liked the orchestral album can’t stand that. But you know, they’re all my friends in their own way. So why not accommodate them all?”

Now that Frank is gone, it’s somehow comforting to reread those words. Frank Vincent Zappa was notoriously intolerant of the imperfections in human nature. With a few curt remarks, he could decimate an audience member foolish enough to shout out a song request, or a journalist presumptuous enough to concoct a half-assed theory about him. Yet he was willing to consider all of us who love his music as “friends.”

There are rabid Zappa fanatics out there who would insist that it is possible for one person to admire Zappa’s knotty, inventive orchestral compositions, his honking, brilliant guitar work and the prickly combination of sociology, satire and schoolboy scatological that went into his song lyrics. But it’s no small undertaking. 

Frank Zappa’s 60-album oeuvre is an imposing body of work. Some of the records are better than others, but the overall quality level is astonishingly high. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Zappa was still in top creative form at age 52, when he succumbed to prostate cancer – on December 4, 1993 – after battling the disease for several years.

We’ll never know what he would have achieved had he lived another 20 or 30 years. But we can console ourselves with the fact that, in the brief time allotted to him, he accomplished far more than most humans. 

Beyond his having been a superb composer and musician, Frank Zappa was also a committed and capable political activist, an innovative filmmaker, able businessman and one of our century’s all-around bona fide smart guys. He raised rock’s IQ more than a few notches.

Frank's first steps

“Scientists believe that the universe is made of hydrogen, because they claim it’s the most plentiful ingredient. I claim that the most plentiful ingredient is stupidity.” That’s what Zappa said in an interview, just a few months before his death, with Pulse! magazine’s Dan Ouellette. 

The “hydrogen” quote was one of Frank’s favorites; it cropped up a lot in interviews down through the years. And in many ways, Zappa’s whole life was a battle against stupidity – the stupidity of mass media conformity, the stupidity of a greedy, inept, ignoble government, the stupidity of thinking it’s cool to be stupid.

Frank liked facts, so here are a few now: He was born on December 21, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland. (His childhood is hilariously chronicled in his 1989 autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book [Poseidon Press].) 

When he was around 10 his family moved to the dismal suburban environs of Lancaster, California. There, he became interested in two strangely dissimilar forms of music: the black R&B and blues sounds of the day, and the early 20th century avant garde compositions of Edgard Varèse, Anton Webern and Igor Stravinsky. 

Both influences can be heard throughout his music. But his blues inspiration is most strongly felt in his guitar work. In 1988, he told me about one of the key experiences of his youth:

“It was when I first heard the guitar solo in Three Hours Past Midnight, by Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. That’s probably one of the most important musical statements I ever heard in my life. And also the guitar solos on I Got Something For You and The Story of My Blues, by Guitar Slim. And Lover Man by Wes Montgomery.”

Another blues artist influenced Zappa in a way that is often overlooked. In a 1980 interview for Trouser Press, Frank told Michael Bloom that he first grew his trademark goatee and mustache because he “thought it looked good on bluesman Johnny Otis.”

As a teenager, Zappa played drums and guitar in a variety of local R&B hands. By the time he reached his early 20s, he’d owned and operated his own recording studio (Studio Z), composed B-movie scores, tried his own hand at filmmaking and co-authored a doo-wop tune called Memories of El Monte, which was recorded by the Penguins. 

Around 1964, Zappa took control of the R&B bar band he was then playing with – the Soul Giants – persuading them to try some songs he’d written. He also changed the name of the band to the Mothers, an event of incalculable sociological importance.

The Mothers came into their own on the mid '60s Los Angeles freak scene. It is generally accepted that hippiedom began in San Francisco. “But the scene in Los Angeles was far more bizarre,” Frank wrote in his autobiography. It was the L.A. underground that gave birth to the Doors, the Byrds, the Seeds and several other fine bands whose names have not become part of Official Rock History. Needless to say, the Mothers were far weirder than any of these acts.

In an era when even the “dangerous” rock bands were still pretty clean and cute, the Mothers were unkempt and ugly, and some of them would very obviously never see 25 again. The wild melange of sounds they generated included some decidedly unfashionable musical styles like doo-wop and lounge jazz. But at this particular juncture in cultural history, the weirder something was, the better it was generally esteemed to be. 

This was one of those times when record companies couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on with “those crazy kids” and their music, so they were signing all kinds of interesting acts with “no commercial potential.” This included the Mothers, who were offered a contract with MGM’s Verve label.

Freaking out the world

1966 saw the release of Freak Out!, the debut album by the Mothers of Invention. (The record company suggested adding “of Invention” to the band’s name, since the word “Mothers” by itself sounded too close to the popular shortened form of “motherfucker,” which – for reasons too complex to detail here – was a very potent word in the hippie counterculture of the mid to late '60s.)

By any reckoning, Freak Out! is one of the most influential rock albums of all time. It is generally considered the first “concept album” and also the first double album in rock. It contains the seeds of all Zappa’s later work.

The first two sides are devoted to songs – satirical, humorous, angry, topical, carefully and resourcefully arranged songs, played with exacting precision. On the second disc, the presentation grows increasingly free-form, culminating in The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.

This piece takes up all of side four (pretty revolutionary in ’66) and offers an aural glimpse of “what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording studio at one o’clock in the morning on $500 worth of rented percussion equipment,” to quote Zappa’s liner notes.

Freak Out! and the Mothers’ subsequent Verve albums did much to establish the Zappa mythology. Frank’s log cabin home at 2401 Laurel Canyon Blvd., in an L.A. neighborhood heavily populated by rock stars, assumed Olympian proportions in the minds of his fans. 

John Mayall even wrote a song about his stay there. Frank’s friends and associates – who bore names like Suzy Creamcheese, Dakota and Motorhead – acquired the larger-than-life stature of Zeus, Hera, Pan and Aphrodite to a generation of suburban teenage misfits. 

These youths felt tremendously empowered by Freak Out!, and its implication that not only was it okay to be a bit strange, frizzy-haired, unpopular and a little too intelligent, it was positively cool. 

But not everything about the Zappa myth was pleasing to the man at its center. Freak Out! almost instantly acquired a reputation as the Number One Album to Take Drugs To, much to the chagrin of its composer, who was resolutely straight all his life.

By 1967, Zappa and the Mothers had migrated to New York, where they began their now-legendary six-month residence at the Garrick Theatre in Greenwich Village. The Mothers basically moved into this decaying old 300-seater, doing two shows a night. Nobody could be certain in advance what was going to occur on any given evening. 

Jimi Hendrix was one of the notable musicians who came down to jam. But in many ways, it was the audience who often provided the real entertainment. Here, during the height of the Vietnam War, Zappa one night convinced three drunken Marines to attack a baby doll with a bayonet on stage.

According to eyewitnesses, the ensuing spectacle made a more powerful anti-war statement than any protest song or political speech ever could.

These “audience participation” segments were to become a popular element of Zappa concerts throughout his career. There’s something completely emblematic of his work in the contrast between the perfectionist discipline of his music and his willingness to entrust a portion of his concerts to some inebriated schmoes randomly selected from the crowd. 

It’s as though he wanted, not to impose order on chaos, but to incorporate chaos into the ordered perfection of his art. If the universe was gonna insist on being inherently stupid, Zappa was determined to find some positive, creative use for all that stupidity.

His entrepreneurial energies were boundless. 1967 also saw the release of his first solo album, Lumpy Gravy. The following year, after his relationship with Verve ended, he started two record labels of his own: Bizarre and Straight, both distributed by Warner/Reprise. Straight was Zappa’s label for presenting new talents he had discovered. 

It was Frank Zappa who brought the world the first recordings by Captain Beefheart and Alice Cooper, as well as less-well-remembered artists like folksinger Tim Buckley, the aptly named Wild Man Fischer and the GTOs. The last was a vocal ensemble comprised of Hollywood scenemakers – including kiss-and-tell rock diarist Pamela Des Barres – who apparently had enough “pull” to entice talents like Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart to perform on their disc.

Bizarre was the label for the Mothers’ own records. The first to appear on the new imprint was 1968’s Uncle Meat. This double-album set is another landmark Zappa work, exhibiting a compositional flair and a gift for woodwind arrangement that far exceeded anything that had come before. 

The liner notes describe this record as “an album of music from a movie you will probably never get to see.” Which was almost true. It took the invention of the VCR and the formation of Zappa’s own Honker Video company in the '80s for the world to see this bizarre cinematic document of the Mothers’ first incarnation.

My guitar wants to kill your mamma: Zappa in the '70s

Zappa had never abandoned the interest in moviemaking that he developed back in his pre-Mothers Studio Z days. But it wasn’t until 1971 that he was able to get a film into commercial release. This was 200 Motels, a surrealistic inquest into the proposition that “touring can make you crazy.” 

200 Motels deserves a place in film history because of the video editing and effects techniques that Zappa pioneered in making it. Also, it has become a perennial favorite among zonked-out midnight movie patrons everywhere.

The accompanying soundtrack album is an essential Zappa work for several reasons. For one, it fully exploited the considerable capabilities of the new Mothers of Invention lineup that Zappa had debuted on the previous year’s album, Chunga’s Revenge. Zappa disbanded the original Mothers in 1969, largely for economic reasons. (By this point, by the way, he was firmly ensconced back in Los Angeles.) 

The newly formed Mothers were fronted by humorists/vocalists Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, formerly of the mid '60s teen pop group, the Turtles. The lineup also included jazz piano ace George Duke and British drummer Aynsley Dunbar, fresh from a stint with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. True to form, Zappa had surrounded himself with a fantastically diverse assortment of musical personalities.

200 Motels was also the first recording on which Zappa fans got the opportunity to hear his music played by a real symphony orchestra, Britain’s Royal Philharmonic, under the baton of Elgar Howarth. In stark Zappa-esque contrast, 200 Motels was also one of the first albums where Frank played really heavy guitar. Even today, tracks like “Magic Fingers” and “Mystery Roach” stand up as sterling examples of mastodon unison riffology and extended fretboard exploration.

Zappa regarded his guitar solos as a form of “instant composition. It’s basically the same intellectual process that I would go through writing music on a piece of paper, except that I don’t have to write it down; it gets done right away. But it’s really no different. You have a certain amount of time that you’re going to fill up by making a piece of music. And you hope that the people who are working with you on stage are also interested in inventing music on the spot. When it works, which is not very often, I’m glad I have a recording truck. I can snag it. Because it’s gone after that. That’s the only time it exists.”

Zappa was incontestably one of the most interesting guitar soloists of all time. His blues grounding gave him an insistent earthiness, while his sense of avant garde, dadaist absurdity pushed him in directions that confounded all expectation. But more than anything else, it was his tone that made him a fiercely distinctive player. His guitar sounded like a gander with a bad sinus condition. He made brilliant use of a wah wah pedal, and was one of the few guitarists of the '70s and '80s to exploit the lower strings and fret positions to their full potential. He laughed when I complimented him on this.

“Well, I think most guitarists have a tendency to play in some way like they talk,” he said. “And since I’m not much of a squealer – I happen to be a baritone kind of guy – to play on the low strings is a little more in phase with my reality.”

Zappa really came into his own as a gonzo guitarist in the '70s. The decade’s inaugural year saw the release of his exquisite, heavily guitar-driven solo album, Hot Rats. The same year also brought the Mothers’ aforementioned Chunga’s Revenge and Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Both feature some flaming beauties of guitar solos. The latter album includes the original recording of Zappa’s axe anthem, My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mamma.

The lineup in Zappa’s bands changed regularly throughout the '70s and early '80s. His groups became increasingly polished from a technical standpoint as he found himself more and more able to draw on top session talent and noted players from every field of music. 

Zappa was a formidable, notoriously demanding band-leader. His band was generally recognized as a hothouse for extremely proficient players; it’s alumni include the guitarists Lowell George, Adrian Belew and Steve Vai.

Some fans of the original Mothers felt that Zappa’s work had become a little slick at this point. The truth is, however, that he’d always used session players. Examine the liner notes to Freak Out! and you’ll find studio aces like Carol Kaye – and even Lawrence Welk’s guitarist, Neil Le Vang – clearly credited. 

Frank never paid much attention to his musicians’ underground credibility. Original Mothers fans also tended to find Kaylan and Volman’s brand of humor a little too broad, obvious and infantile. A new legion of fans, however, liked it just fine.

What did happen during the '70s is that Zappa’s albums began growing more “unidirectional.” He began sorting out the different strands in his work. His early albums combined satire, serious composition, gross-out jokes and jazzy improvisation, all in one gloriously multifaceted package. Later on, he would focus on just one of these elements for any given album.

A record like 1973’s Overnite Sensation is heavy on humor, whereas The Grand Wazoo (1972) is mostly about composition and jazz-based soloing.

The highly specialized '80s

In the '80s, Zappa took this trend toward specialization to a new level with the release of the Shut Up ‘N Play Yer Guitar series, an orgy of guitar solos and nothing else, directed straight at the coterie of Zappa axe junkies. 

By this point, he had started a new label, Barking Pumpkin, and his own marketing/mail order operation, Barfko-Swill, after his deal with Warner/Reprise and a subsequent arrangement with Mercury Records had gone sour. Zappa maintained close ties with his fans. Unlike many rock stars he was highly accessible.

“When we’re on the road there are kids who follow us from town to town,” he explained in 1988. “If we see the same faces when we arrive at the venue for an afternoon soundcheck, we let them in and they sit through the soundcheck. And you know, I talk to these people. They tell me interesting things. For example, a fan in Germany was the first to point out that there were incorrect dates and locations in the liner notes for You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore.”

Frank deemed this kind of networking essential in the face of what he regarded as an increasingly incompetent, crooked and imbecilic music industry. Marketing his own music was “the only way I can exist,” he told me. “There’s no way that what I do can fit within a corporate format. In the United States, radio is a cultural embarrassment. Most of the music that’s broadcast is harmful to your mental health.”

The early '80s brought many opportunities for Frank’s orchestral and chamber compositions to be recorded and performed. 1983 saw the release of the first London Symphony Orchestra disc, which was followed a year later by The Perfect Stranger: Boulez Conducts Zappa. 

During this period, there were also performances of Zappa’s music by ensembles such as the Kronos String Quartet and Aspen Wind Quintet. These developments were very gratifying to the composer, who had long sought an outlet for his more serious work. 

But he entertained no illusions about the classical music power structure. He found it every bit as frustrating and foolish as the pop music industry. Zappa was no snob.

“I have no following or any pretensions to a following in the normal classical consumer environment,” he told me in a 1984 interview. “The normal audience for an orchestral piece wouldn’t be caught anywhere in the vicinity of what I write. It’s just not relevant to their lifestyle, nor is it written for their tastes. Basically, the material is written to amuse me and anybody else who has a similar musical outlook.”

Zappa may have found his ideal musical collaborator in the Synclavier computer music system (a high-end music workstation), which also entered his life in the mid Eighties. “What I’ve been waiting for since I started writing music was a chance to hear what I write played without mistakes and without a bad attitude,” he said in 1984.

“The Synclavier solves that problem for me.” The Synclavier-based Jazz From Hell album won Zappa a Grammy in 1988. He was somewhat obsessed with the device. When I spoke to him in 1988 he estimated that he had some 500 new compositions stored on computer disc: “I work every night on that. My Synclavier hours are usually from about 11:00 at night until 7:00 in the morning.” Nocturnal in his work habits, Zappa preferred to be asleep while the rest of the world went about its dubious business.

Frank embraced the digital revolution wholeheartedly. As soon as the Compact Disc format established itself, he threw himself into the monumental task of remastering his entire back catalog for CD release through Rykodisk.

Later, he embarked on the equally ambitious Beat the Boots series for Rhino Records, offering quality masterings of his live concerts as an alternative to the unauthorized bootleg Zappa product that has been flooding the market ever since the Sixties.

The pristine digital perfection of the Synclavier took Zappa entirely away from guitar playing from 1984-’88; he said he didn’t touch the instrument once during that period. But in 1988, he assembled a band, its members culled from the cream of the players he’d worked with during the '80s – including guitarists Ike Willis and “stunt” axeman Mike Keneally – for a world tour. The results, which are among Zappa’s last public performances on guitar, can be heard on two discs: Broadway the Hard Way and The Greatest Band You Never Heard in Your Life.

Amid all these projects, Zappa also found time to become a vigorous political activist. In 1985, he testified at the U.S. Senate’s “porn rock” hearings. He became one of the most outspoken and eloquent campaigners against the censorship of rock music, a tireless free speech activist and protector of constitutional rights.

In 1989, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Zappa was invited to Czechoslovakia by the country’s new president, Vaclav Havel, as an economic advisor. For several months, he acted as the country’s economic representative to the West. Zappa was increasingly drawn to politics. It’s reported that he was planning a serious presidential campaign.

This was one of many plans that were canceled when he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer in 1990. According to an article in Pulse!, the condition had been developing for some eight to 10 years before it was detected.

Rumors of Frank’s illness began to spread in the music industry shortly after the diagnosis. At first, they were widely disbelieved; it just seemed like another stupid, obviously untrue Frank Zappa story. But when the family confirmed the rumors, there was no more denying the grim fact.

Zappa continued working right up until the end. As a result he was able to see the release of one last recording of his music, The Yellow Shark, performed by Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern. This lavish and beautifully realized album reaches all the way back to compositions from Uncle Meat – a fitting end to a wondrously rich career.

But we’ve hardly heard the last of Zappa’s music. Frank’s unflagging creative energy left behind a legacy of unreleased compositions and recordings that will sustain us for many years to come. Not long after his death, Rykodisk released the superb Zappa orchestral work Civilization Phaze III. There has been a steady stream of Zappa reissues and compilations of previously unreleased material, including The Lost Episodes, Lather, Have I Offended Someone and Mystery Disc. Zappa’s unflagging creative energy left behind a musical legacy that will sustain us for many years to come.

“I am a realistic kind of guy,” Frank told Guitar World’s John Swenson in 1982. “I just try and look at things the way they are, take them for what they are, deal with them, and go on to the next case. But Americans thrive on hype and bloated images and bloated everything. They turn away from anything that’s realistic. They want the candy gloss version of whatever it is.”

And that’s the one version that Frank never played.

It’s been years in the making, but the first trailer for the long-awaited Frank Zappa documentary, Zappa, has now been released.

The new film is a two-hour deep dive into the legendary artist’s incredible life and career. It was directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter, who was granted unfettered access to the Zappa family trust and all archival footage.

The film itself “explores the private life behind the mammoth musical career that never shied away from the political turbulence of its time.”

In addition to Zappa’s widow, Gail Zappa, the film features interviews with musical collaborators including Steve Vai, Mike Keneally, Ian Underwood, Pamela Des Barres, Bunk Gardner, David Harrington, Scott Thunes, Ruth Underwood, Ray White and others.

"Frank Zappa was not only a creative genius, but also a great and eloquent thinker who articulated the madness of his times with extraordinary clarity and wit," said Winter.

"A legitimate maverick who lived and worked amongst other extraordinary people in historic times. Ultimately, Zappa is not a retro trip into the past, but a thoroughly modern exploration of a man whose worldview, art and politics were far ahead of their time, and profoundly relevant in our challenging times."

Added Ahmet Zappa, one of the film’s producers, “I'm thrilled Magnolia is bringing the Zappa movie to the world. This emotional journey began with my mother’s belief in Alex Winter and he’s made an extraordinary film.

“I’m so grateful to the fans who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign. Their support was invaluable as is our partnership with UMG. I feel in my heart Frank and Gail would be so proud of the documentary and I can’t wait for everyone to see it!”

Zappa will be released in the US on November 27th. For more information, head to Zappa Movie.

There’s a good reason why you’ll never hear a covers band attempt Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats. It’s impossible. It’s unperformable. It’s unfathomable. 

Even putting aside the art-rock icon’s leftfield electric guitar virtuosity, the 1969 album is a tapestry of overdubs and tape manipulation, a web of sonic subterfuge and obtuse one-offmanship, with makeshift ‘instruments’ that include a plastic comb and a mechanic’s wrench.

Given that even Zappa himself couldn’t recreate these tracks on the stage – what hope do mere mortals have? But that hasn’t stopped Dweezil Zappaaccepting the challenge. 

For the last 13 years, the fabled guitarist’s talented son has been the frontman and driving force behind Zappa Plays Zappa: a passion project that seeks to keep his late father’s music alive. Now, in a new chapter that has seen the guitarist slip between the roles of detective, genealogist and gear anorak, Dweezil has dissected every last element of Hot Rats – from signal flow to studio tricks – and he will present the results at seven UK dates in December, starting at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

“We want these shows to be like a time machine,” he says.

What made you want to bring Hot Rats to the stage?

“Well, it’s always been one of my favourites. I have a connection to that record that’s more than just musical, because it was made the year I was born and dedicated to me. To me, it’s one of the records that showcased my dad’s guitar playing in a new way. When you hear Hot Rats, compared to the early Mothers Of Invention stuff, there’s a different feel. It’s got a ton of attitude, y’know, songs like Willie The Pimp and The Gumbo Variations have some ripping guitar. 

"But then it’s got compositions like It Must Be A Camel, where you think, ‘How did he come up with this stuff?’ There’s a couple of songs he never played live, too, like Little Umbrellas and It Must Be A Camel. You won’t find live versions of those anywhere; they only exist on Hot Rats.”

What stage was Frank’s career at in 1969?

“He was still in his 20s, moving towards more complicated music and getting musicians that could play this harder stuff – because the Mothers Of Invention guys couldn’t. He dropped the Mothers Of Invention name and he was out on his own. And what you’ll hear when you dive into Hot Rats – particularly on Little Umbrellas and It Must Be A Camel – is that it’s much more the work of a composer, as opposed to a pop songwriter. 

"You’re hearing him really go deep into the compositional realm. The textures, the harmonies, the layers of instrumentation, the arranging, the way he manipulated instruments and changed their character: that’s what makes Hot Rats special. You won’t hear that on any other record of his – or any other record, for that matter.”

How did you approach the guitar parts?

“Well, I had to make a decision: how much of this record will I play note-for-note? Certain things were worth playing exactly the same. Like, obviously, the solo in Peaches En Regalia and Son Of Mr Green Genes, because that song is just so idiosyncratic. It’s my dad, doing what he does, and you’re not gonna top it. For others, like Willie The Pimp, I chose to learn a lot of the phrases but fill in the spaces between those guideposts with my own playing so I can also be free in my improvisation.

"But even when I’m playing freely, I’m still filtering what I play through his vocabulary. I know a lot of things that my dad would favour, the things that would be something he’d play. I didn’t want to take a big left-turn and suddenly think, ‘Oh, we’re in a totally different space.’”

Are there any signature techniques on the Hot Rats album?

“Well, one thing you hear him do a lot is mix up different versions of triplets. He’s got these really groovy pentatonic-bluesy runs where he’s squeezing triplets in places that most people wouldn’t think to do. And it’s because he started as a drummer. It’s almost like he’s got little rudiment-type articulations. It’s like sticking exercises or something – that have been attached to notes.”

How did you work out the guitar parts?

“I’d use a transcription software tool, which lets you slow things down but keep the pitch the same. The band is quite adept at reading – and I’m not, I do everything by ear. Then you learn it bit by bit and end up memorising it. The other process is, if there’s a composition that already has a transcription, we’d go through and check it against the recording to make sure they’re correct. There are transcriptions, even in published books, that have a lot of mistakes. So we check, double-check, triple-check.”

What are the challenges of recreating this music?

“One of the biggest challenges is the Hot Rats production. It’s a great-sounding album. People really appreciate it just on an audio level. So we wanted to make it evocative of the actual album and era. That’s almost as much work as learning the notes themselves.

“Sometimes it’s very difficult, if you don’t have access to the actual individual tracks, to decipher exactly what’s going on on this album. Especially with songs like Little Umbrellas and It Must Be A Camel. Because they had dense harmonies, layers of instruments, so many overdubs. And sometimes, for example, my dad would use a tape machine to extend the range of brass and woodwind instruments; he’d record them at a different speed so they’d play back at a higher register, and that’d totally change the timbre of the recording. Or he might have a really high-pitched snare. 

"The guitar was actually recorded at normal speed. But on Peaches En Regalia, he recorded bass guitar at a different speed and he was tremolo picking it, so it ends up sounding like a synthesiser – well before most synths were made. If you were to just ignore those textures, it wouldn’t have the same flavour.”

Let’s talk about the guitar sounds on Hot Rats now…

“The real challenge was to recreate the lead guitar tones, to explore what my dad would have been using to make that unique fuzz tone with the clean tone blended in there. He had a kind of Frankenstein Goldtop he was playing at the time that had a Bigsby and a Telecaster pickup jammed in, so he had different out-of-phase options.

“At the time of Hot Rats, there weren’t many fuzz options out there, and he wasn’t yet using any of the Marshall or Orange amps. I think he was using Fender – it sounds like it was a Tweed amp – and he was combining fuzz stuff with the clean sound. So when you listen to Willie The Pimp, for example, there’s a fuzz tone that sounds to me like a Maestro, which has a Uni-Vibe on it that changes speeds, plus a wah-wah – I think he was using Vox at the time. But the wah is only going to the clean direct part, and it seemed like they were manipulating it after the fact, because the speed change of the Uni-Vibe and the wah are happening at the same time, and it would have required two feet to do it.”

Didn’t you inherit Frank’s Goldtop when he died?

“No, it was stolen. But for the Hot Rats tour, I’ll be playing a replica from the Gibson Custom Shop. Gibson made it about eight years ago, based on photographs of the guitar and all the specs I gave them. We made it as era-specific as we could, so it looks beat-up and it has the missing knobs. My dad’s Goldtop had P-90s, with that Tele pickup jammed in right next to the bridge.

”But as much as I love the sound of P-90s, I don’t love the noise that comes with them. So I basically have humbucking P-90s and a Tele pickup, all made by a Canadian guy called Tim McNelly. I can make them singlecoil with one switch, but I can also make them go out of phase in different ways. I have a piezo in there as well, so I can do the acoustic stuff that you hear on Peaches En Regalia. It’s a particularly heavy guitar – I haven’t weighed it, but it feels like at least 13lbs. I’m mostly used to playing an SG, so that Les Paul has really changed the way I play."

How did you recreate that very specific tone from Hot Rats?

“Well, the Fractal Axe-Fx is a great tool for me, particularly for stuff where you have to add a clean sound into a distorted sound. The Axe-Fx is great for that, because you can route different things to different outputs, and if I’m using four speakers in my rig, I can separate out the clean and dirty stuff, and actually blend them back together with volume pedals, and have control over the levels like at a mixing console. 

"You can hear on certain parts of Willie The Pimp, for example, that the clean sound is louder than the distorted sound. My dad was just pushing up the fader forthe clean sound, but I can do that with my feet while I’m playing.

“It does take a lot of research to work out what the clean sound on Hot Rats would have been, though. It’s a direct sound, in some cases, that’s compressed, but it gets a bit of clipping from the console and tape machine. I recreate some of those saturation techniques, so it’s not just a pristine clean sound, it’s got a bit of edge. 

"With the distortion stuff, I’ll also manipulate how hard the speaker is being run, because in the Fractal you have all this detail of how much saturation you want. I’m also using the Overstayer Master And Servant in my rig, acting like an analogue mastering section that’s adding some punch and saturation to the sound before it goes to the front of house. Even after that, when the front of house guy is mixing it, he’s using a tape machine plug-in to create even more of the layers, finding ways to blend in the old‑school quality of the sound.

“So we’ve gone to great lengths to recreate the signal flow that could have taken place during the recording. We want it to be like a time machine. We don’t want to modernise any of it.”

Will you be taking traditional amps on the road?

“No, I’ll just use the Fractal. Inside that, you’ve got every amp you could ever want. Typically, I’ll use Marshall and Fender [settings], but sometimes I use other boutique amps, like one by a Dutch company called Hook. With the Fractal, you can recreate things in incredible detail and store it in the presets.

“Another thing that’s made a big difference is, there’s a guy in Philadelphia who bought a lot of my dad’s old equipment. He bought the speaker cabs that my dad used in the 70s and these were Marshall cabs that had JBL speakers. A lot of people wouldn’t put those in their cabs because they’re more hi-fi, they have a broader frequency response, and for a certain kind of distortion they can be very bright or brittle – and a little stiff. But the way my dad ran his rigs, he was always looking for clarity in certain frequency ranges.

“Anyway, I was able to do some speaker IRs, y’know, some impulse responses with the actual cabs he used, and get it much more specifically dialled in. They’re built into the signal chain, just added into my speaker collection inside the Fractal.”

Do you think the Zappa Plays Zappa project has worked?

“Well, just the fact it’s existed for this length of time means there’s an appetite. When I set out, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’ll do this for 20 years.’ But there’s enough music that it could keep going. The thing about my dad’s music is that it was never fully discovered. He had some songs that made it onto the radio and that would give people one singular impression of what he could do. 

"But it gave the wrong impression. Things like Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow, Valley Girl, or even Cosmik Debris – some of these songs have a comedic narrative, and after his passing people started to consider him more like a novelty act. But it didn’t reflect the rest of what he really stood for. So my goal was to actually put the spotlight on the things he should have been known for – his compositional skills, his arranging, his guitar playing…”

Do you think working on this project has made you a better guitarist?

“Oh, for sure. I never would have been able to do the things I can currently do on guitar had I not taken a deep dive into learning this music. This stuff requires a lot of effort to learn. It’s very tough…”

A new comprehensive book chronicling Frank Zappa’s guitars and other equipment will be released on November 29.

Titled Zappa Gear: The Unique Guitars, Amplifiers, Effects Units, Keyboards and Studio Equipment, the tome was written by Mick Ekers, with a foreword from Dweezil Zappa.

In addition to covering guitars, amps and more – everything from Zappa’s Marshalls and Gibson SGs to his wah-wah pedals and Synclavier – in incredible detail, Zappa Gear discusses some of the inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs without whom the musician’s particular, often modified equipment wouldn’t have existed. 

The book also includes over 180 photographs of Frank’s guitars and gear taken by the author at Zappa's UMRK studio in Los Angeles. 

Zappa Gear will also be joined by a second tome, The Hot Rats Book, by Bill Gubbins and Ahmet Zappa, due December 15.

The deluxe, commemorative offering celebrates the 50th anniversary of Zappa’s Hot Rats albums and boasts never before-seen photos from Gubbins, the only photographer to document the album sessions, as well as an interview between Gubbins and Ahmet Zappa. 

Both Zappa Gear and The Hot Rats Books were produced and written with the full cooperation of the Zappa Family Trust. 

Said Ahmet, "These books provide another way for fans to connect with Frank Zappa. They give a fascinating window into Frank's mind and the ideas he came up with throughout his career."

Live music hologram production company Eyellusion has announced "The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa" hologram tour, which will kick off April 19 at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York.

The story behind the upcoming shows is as follows: In 1974, Zappa transformed his Los Angeles rehearsal space into a sound stage and cranked out some unbelievable performances seen and heard only by the camera operators in the room. The audio from these performances—locked away in the Zappa vaults for 44 years—will serve as the basis for what will be the world's most ambitious hologram tour to date. The "can't miss" concert spectacle is being produced in close cooperation with the Zappa Family Trust. 

The "Bizarre World of Frank Zappa" hologram tour band is comprised of former Zappa bandmates. The touring unit boasts guitarists Ray White and Mike Keneally, bassist Scott Thunes, multi-instrumentalist Robert Martin, percussionist Ed Mann, and drummer and Zappa archivist Joe "Vaultmeister" Travers.

Said Ahmet Zappa, EVP of business development for Eyellusion and co-trustee of the Zappa Family Trust: "As a futurist, and hologram enthusiast, Frank fearlessly broke through boundary after boundary as an artist and in honouring his indomitable spirit, we're about to do it again, 25 years after his passing.

"We're excited to world premiere a handful of Frank Zappa compositions; these mind-melting concerts we're putting together celebrate the music, often surreal imagery and humour synonymous with Frank. We will be pushing the limits of what anyone has seen holographically on stage before in a live venue. Circumstances, objects, places and subject matter from Frank's songs and imagination will be brought to life for the first time on stage. We are anthropomorphizing Frank's music utilizing various visual techniques, art styles, classic imagery from his album artwork and characters from his songs, culminating in one extremely bizarre, live music experience.”

Ahmet continued: "My father and I actively discussed 3D and 'holography' and it was a concept he actively engaged in. He actually devoted half a chapter of his The Real Frank Zappa Book to this subject. This is a love letter and a journey celebrating the genius artistry of Frank Zappa. On a personal note, I feel like I am finishing something my father started years ago. And let's not forget, Frank himself will be rocking his fans, alongside his bandmates like nobody's business."

Tickets for the U.S. shows go on sale Friday, February 15 at 10:00 AM (ET) at all major ticketing outlets, with a special VIP pre-sale launching on Wednesday, February 13.

For more information, head over to Zappa.com.

The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa U.S. dates:

4/19   Port Chester, NY    Capitol Theater

4/20   Rochester, NY       Kodak Center Theater

4/22   Red Bank, NJ         Count Basie

4/24   Long Island, NY     Paramount Theatre

4/26   Boston, MA  Shubert

4/28   Albany, NY   The Palace Theatre

05/1   Wilkes Barre, PA    Kirby Center

05/2   Collingswood, NJ    Scottish Rite Auditorium

05/3   Baltimore, MD       The Modell Lyric

The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa European dates: 

5/9    Edinburgh, UK       Playhouse

5/11   Gateshead, UK      Sage

5/12   Manchester, UK     Bridgewater Hall

5/13   Birmingham, UK    Symphony Hall

5/14   London, UK  The Palladium

5/16   Ostend, BEL Kurssal

5/17   Amsterdam, NLD   Rai Theater

First opening its doors in August 1926, The Capitol Theatre has been a rock and roll haven for decades, drawing fans and bands from all over to its hallowed halls in Port Chester, N.Y. Below, we celebrate this iconic venue with ten legendary concerts, spanning from the Seventies all the way up to today. Here's to many more years of rocking at The Cap!

To find out more, visit thecapitoltheatre.com.

Pink Floyd – April 22, 1970

Years before breaking through in the U.S. with Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd were a struggling young act. Their April 22, 1970 Capitol Theatre performance has since become a treasured bootleg for dedicated followers of the band. Only a few weeks after the show, their gear was stolen during a stop in New Orleans, abruptly ending their U.S. tour. Listen to audio from this standout performance below. 

Frank Zappa – November 10, 1974

Zappa blessed The Capitol Theatre with performances throughout the Seventies, and this memorable show took place just a few months after the release of Apostrophe, his highest charting album in the U.S. Check out the setlist here.

Derek and the Dominos – December 4 & 5, 1970

Derek and the Dominos finished their U.S. tour at The Capitol Theatre in December of 1970 with a mighty set that included "Tell the Truth," "Have You Ever Loved a Woman," "Blues Power" and more. While the marquee only displayed Clapton's name, it was indeed a Derek and the Dominoes performance. 

Johnny Winter – April 10, 1970

Beloved blues guitarist and singer Johnny Winter performed at The Capitol Theatre six times between 1970 and 1971, and his acclaimed live album, Live Johnny Winter And, was partially recorded the venue. Since his passing in 2014, it remains a cherished piece of Winter's discography. Check out the full album below. 

Grateful Dead – February 19, 1971

Having played The Capitol Theatre 18 times between 1970 and 1971, the Grateful Dead are woven into the venue's history. This particular show spawned in the fan-favorite bootleg, Three From The Vault, which was released officially in 2007. The concert also marked Mickey Hart's temporary departure from the band until his formal return almost five years later. For serious followers of the Dead, the setlist included the first-ever live performances of "Deal" and "Bird Song."

Hot Tuna – June 18, 2014

Capitol Theatre veterans with 13 shows under their belt between 1970-2017, Hot Tuna's Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady returned with a vengeance for their June 2014 concert, sharing the bill with legendary songwriter Leon Russell. The band delivered classic tracks, plus selections from Steady As She Goes, their recent LP recorded at Levon Helm’s studio in Woodstock, N.Y.

Jeff Beck & Buddy Guy – July 19, 2016

Showgoers were treated to two massive guitar legends during the course of one night; six-string innovator Jeff Beck and blues godfather Buddy Guy. A highlight included Guy leaving the stage during "Slippin' Out, Slippin In" to completely surprise the audience by joining them in the crowd.

Dixie Dregs – March 12, 2018

Performing with their classic lineup for the first time in 40 years, the Dixie Dregs took to The Capitol Theatre stage in March of 2018 for this electric performance. “All the signs were ‘this is not the way to do it,’” guitarist Steve Morse later commented. “However, when we played, people smiled, got energetic and came back [with more] people—so on that front, everything [looked] good.”

Trey Anastasio Band – April 14 & 15, 2017

The Trey Anastasio Band blew away The Capitol Theatre crowd with two sold-out shows on April 14 and 15, 2017. Anastasio, thrilled to regroup the band, was visibly giddy throughout Friday's opening show. The band even took requests from the audience throughout the show, making it an unforgettably fun night. Below, check out audio from the second night's performance. 

Tedeschi Trucks Band – February 20 & 21, 2018

As usual, Tedeschi Trucks Band delivered an impressive set just shy of twenty songs, putting their spin on originals and covers alike. Led by Susan Tedeschi's powerhouse vocals and Derek Trucks' brilliant guitar playing, Tedeschi Trucks Band had the audience on their feet for two nights of phenomenal music at The Cap.

Frank Zappa is known as one of music’s great improvisers, and it’s a gift that his son Dweezil has as well.

A couple years back, Dweezil sat down with Reverb to share a few of his favorite tricks he learned from his father and some of the logic behind his approach to improvised soloing.

In the interview, Dweezil talks about his father’s remarkable improvisational skills and his ability to play for long periods without ever repeating himself. Dweezil says that was always his goal when playing his father’s music—to build the extensive vocabulary necessary for that level of improvisation—and in this video he shares a few of his father’s techniques that help him do it successfully.

In a related video, also included at bottom, Joe from Reverb looks at three meat-and-potatoes Zappa-esque riffs to give just a brief introduction to his varied style.

You can read more about Frank Zappa’s techniques here, as well as learn about his gear at Reverb.

The fine folks over at Reverb LP —an offshoot of reverb.com dedicated to buying and selling vinyl—recently posted a neat little excerpt of an interview they did with Dweezil Zappa.

In it, Dweezil Zappa dishes on where those curious about the music of his father, Frank Zappa, should start.

To cover all the bases, the younger Zappa takes care to give answers for both Zappa's rock works and his equally extensive (but less well-known) classical discography.

You can watch the informative video above.

For more on Reverb LP, stop by lp.reverb.com.

In December 1973, Frank Zappa & the Mothers performed five concerts across three nights at the Roxy Theatre on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. Though portions of the recordings taken from these performances have been released in a couple of forms over the years—primarily in 1974's Roxy and Elsewhere and 2014's Roxy by Proxy—they have never been released in their entirety, until now that is.

The Roxy Performances—a seven-disc set capturing the performances in their entirety, in addition to recordings taken from rehearsals and soundchecks prior to the shows—will be released February 2, via Zappa Records/Ume.

The band's lineup at the time of the performance was comprised of Zappa, keyboardist George Duke, bassist Tom Fowler, trombonist Bruce Fowler, tenor saxophonist and vocalist Napoleon Murphy Brock, percussionist Ruth Underwood and drummers Ralph Humphrey and Chester Thompson. During the performances, the band mostly played material 1969 and beyond, including cuts from Uncle Meat, Hot Rats, Waka/Jawaka and Over-Nite Sensation. You can check out the full tracklist below.

“This is one of my favorite FZ line-ups ever. This box contains some of the best nights of music Los Angeles has ever seen with their ears at an historic venue," Ahmet Zappa—who co-produced the collection along with Travers—said in a press release. “Hold on to your hotdogs people. This box is the be-all-end-all. This is it. This is all of it. It’s time to get your rocks off for the Roxy.”

You can preorder The Roxy Performances here.

DISC 1

12-9-73 Show 1

1. Sunday Show 1 Start 4:59

2. Cosmik Debris 11:33

3. “We’re Makin’ A Movie” 3:16

4. Pygmy Twylyte 9:08

5. The Idiot Bastard Son 2:19

6. Cheepnis 3:44

7. Hollywood Perverts 1:07

8. Penguin In Bondage 5:54

9. T’Mershi Duween 1:56

10. The Dog Breath Variations 1:44

11. Uncle Meat 2:29

12. RDNZL 5:14

13. Montana 7:49

14. Dupree’s Paradise 15:25

TT: 76:43

DISC 2

1. Dickie’s Such An Asshole 10:29

12-9-73 Show 2

2. Sunday Show 2 Start 4:08

3. Inca Roads 8:27

4. Village Of The Sun 4:19

5. Echidna’s Arf (Of You) 4:01

6. Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing? 13:22

7. Slime Intro :59

8. I’m The Slime 3:34

9. Big Swifty 9:01

TT: 58:25

DISC 3

1. Tango #1 Intro 3:50

2. Be-Bop Tango

(Of The Old Jazzmen’s Church) 18:12

3. Medley:

King Kong

Chunga’s Revenge

Son Of Mr. Green Genes 9:46

12-10-73 Show 1

4. Monday Show 1 Start 5:31

5. Montana 6:57

6. Dupree’s Paradise 21:26

7. Cosmik Intro 1:05

8. Cosmik Debris 8:05

TT: 74:57

DISC 4

1. Bondage Intro 1:52

2. Penguin In Bondage 6:54

3. T’Mershi Duween 1:52

4. The Dog Breath Variations 1:48

5. Uncle Meat 2:29

6. RDNZL 4:59

7. Audience Participation - RDNZL 3:08

8. Pygmy Twylyte 4:05

9. The Idiot Bastard Son 2:21

10. Cheepnis 4:49

11. Dickie’s Such An Asshole 10:21

12-10-73 Show 2

12. Monday Show 2 Start 5:13

13. Penguin In Bondage 6:33

14. T’Mershi Duween 1:52

15. The Dog Breath Variations 1:46

16. Uncle Meat 2:28

17. RDNZL 5:11

TT: 67:50

DISC 5

1. Village Of The Sun 4:05

2. Echidna’s Arf (Of You) 3:54

3. Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing? 6:56

4. Cheepnis - Percussion 4:08

5. “I Love Monster Movies” 2:10

6. Cheepnis 3:35

7. “Turn The Light Off”/Pamela’s Intro 3:59

8. Pygmy Twylyte 7:23

9. The Idiot Bastard Son 2:22

10. Tango #2 Intro 2:01

11. Be-Bop Tango

(Of The Old Jazzmen’s Church) 22:08

TT: 62:46

DISC 6

1. Dickie’s Such An Asshole 15:39

Bonus Section: 12-10-73 Roxy Rehearsal

2. Big Swifty - In Rehearsal 2:50

3. Village Of The Sun 3:13

4. Farther O’Blivion - In Rehearsal 5:34

5. Pygmy Twylyte 6:17

Unreleased Track

6. That Arrogant Dick Nixon 2:19

12-12-73 Bolic Studios Recording Session

7. Kung Fu - In Session 4:50

8. Kung Fu - with guitar overdub 1:17

9. Tuning and Studio Chatter 3:38

10. Echidna’s Arf (Of You) - In Session 1:22

11. Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow - In Session 9:49

12. Nanook Rubs It - In Session 5:41

13. St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast - In Session 2:46

14. Father O’Blivion - In Session 2:31

15. Rollo (Be-Bop Version) 2:36

TT: 70:31

DISC 7

12-8-73 Sound Check/Film Shoot

1. Saturday Show Start 2:20

2. Pygmy Twylyte/Dummy Up 20:25

3. Pygmy Twylyte - Part II 14:25

4. Echidna’s Arf (Of You) 3:42

5. Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing? 6:01

6. Orgy, Orgy 3:39

7. Penguin In Bondage 6:30

8. T’Mershi Duween 1:53

9. The Dog Breath Variations 1:45

10. Uncle Meat/Show End 4:01

TT: 64:46

Your work is a through-line for some of my favorite music: Frank Zappa to David Bowie to Talking Heads to King Crimson. Apart from good taste in guitarists, what would you say those artists had in common? —Jeff Niemczura

They’re innovators, and so are people like Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails. So many of the people that have been drawn to me—and who’ve had me work with them—are the kind of artists I’d naturally love, because that’s the kind of music I’m drawn to. I think what we have in common, and I’ll include myself in this since I’ve worked with all these people, is that we’re trying to take music and move it forward and not just stay in one place with it. Every one of those artists you mentioned has their own unique way of approaching music, and I just happen to be one of those people who has enough flexibility that I can fit into any of those packages.

How did Gizmodrome come together, and how would you describe its sound? —Damien Linotte

The last couple of summers, I’ve been in contact with a keyboard player named Vittorio Cosma and a producer named Claudio Dentes about a project in Milan with Stewart Copeland [of the Police]. Eventually I found out Stewart and Vittorio had been doing this for about 10 summers, just getting together, finding a reason to play—just so they could hang out in Italy and eat pasta. By the time I could do it, it had changed to something a little more organized; they’d been offered a record deal from Germany. Without letting me know they were hoping I would join a band with them, they got me to come over.

I thought I was gonna play on four tracks—you know, come in, be in the control room and add guitar. But when I got there, I realized, nope, this is something else. We were set up in a large studio, we could see each other, hear each other, talk to each other, and we started right in doing basic tracks. I was having fun, and I loved the people in the band, so I wasn’t too concerned about it. It took about two or three days before I realized, Hey, this is really good. So that’s how I fell into it.

I wasn’t thinking I’d be in another band; I’ve got the Power Trio, which I’ve had for 11 years. But this was something different. How would I describe the sound? I couldn’t possibly do that, but it’s funky, it’s groovy, it’s happy, it’s joyful, it’s played by guys who know how to play. [laughs] I think it’s a feel-good kind of record.

I read an interview with you years ago where you discussed a new tuning. It was right around Twang Bar King [1983] and Three of a Perfect Pair [King Crimson, 1984]. Robert Fripp had started using his new standard tuning, but you were doing something else, a simple alteration. What was it? —Keith McCrea

In the Eighties, I used altered tunings a lot, and Robert used standard tuning. So, even on records like “Heartbeat” or something like that, you can play it in standard tuning but it’s different. I always would change maybe one or two strings, so it wouldn’t be a very radical change. Then I came up with a very radical tuning I used on a Dobro for many years, and I wrote a record called Desire Caught by the Tail [1986], which was done with that tuning. But by the end of the Eighties, I had decided it was too cumbersome to have so many tunings, especially if you were gonna play those songs live.

King Crimson stopped for a number of years, and in that period, I switched back to standard tuning and Robert made up his “new standard” tuning. So, when we came back together in the Nineties, our roles had kind of reversed. I never did use Robert’s tuning. I tried it once and, well, tunings are relevant to the player. If they ring a note for you and you find some chord shapes, away you go. I couldn’t do that with that tuning. It’s not meant for me.

Have you ever used Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies in the studio? —Bjorn Lakenstrazen

The only time I actually used them is when we were making [David Bowie’s 1979 album] Lodger. We used them in the studio then. I thought they were kind of fun. You’d draw a card, and it says, “Think green.” Okay, I’m gonna try to think green now. I don’t know how seriously they were supposed to be taken, but we kind of more or less giggled at them. [laughs]

Can you describe your audition for Frank Zappa? I hear it’s kind of a funny story. —Tommy Moore

I flew out to Frank’s house—my first time on a plane. That’s how green I was. They picked me up and took me to his house in the basement, which would turn into his studio over the years. It was just a big empty room. Frank’s sitting behind a console, he’s got a cigarette in his mouth, of course, and there’s a microphone in the middle of the room. Unfortunately, there were people moving things all over; here goes a piano in front of you, they’re setting up something over there and so on. It was very distracting. Frank gave me a long list of songs. I had to borrow the albums from friends because I was so poor.

We started, and he’d say, “Okay, let’s try ‘Andy,’ ” and I’d play it for a minute or two and sing some things, and then he’d stop me, take another puff and say, “Okay, try ‘Wind Up Workin’ in a Gas Station.’ I was fumbling and really being distracted by all the stuff going on. I had nowhere to go, so they were gonna take me back to the airport and fly me back home, so I just watched everyone else’s terrifying auditions. I watched keyboard players and percussionists and thought, “Oh my god, these guys are so great, I don’t know how I’ll ever be in this band.”

There was a moment at the end of the day, though, where it was just Frank and I standing there, and I said, “I’m sorry, I really thought I could do this, and I thought it would be different.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I thought it would just be you and me somewhere quiet where I could show you that I could do this.” So we went up to his living room and sat on his purple couch, I took my little Pignose amp and stuffed it between the pillows so I could turn it up as loud as I could, and we started over. We got about a third of the way through and Frank was starting to sing along with me. Finally he put his hand out, shook my hand and said, “You’ve got the job.” Changed my life, that handshake did.

You started out as a drummer. Does that affect how you play guitar? —Louis-Jules Trochu

Absolutely. I don’t think, for example, I would’ve done that well with Frank [Zappa]’s music had I not had such a rhythmic background. It’s very natural to me. I’ve always been able to play in an odd time signature and shake my booty in 4/4 at the same time and make it groovy, because it’s all a matter of accenting anyway. I also think my time with Frank and my time as a drummer—and I still play drums on my solo records—was important to my being able to write the kind of material I’ve written with King Crimson. Frank was a drummer first too, by the way.

What really led to the end of your involvement with King Crimson? —Ken Brown

Simple! Robert just pulled the plug. [laughs] We had done 10 shows as a five-piece band with new drummer Gavin Harrison along with Pat Mastelotto, and I thought we were gonna continue on from there, and at the end of those 10 shows, Robert seemed to be game for that as well. But within a few weeks, it was over. He said, “I’m not gonna play anymore,” and that was that. When he put together the current lineup, he had something totally different in mind, and he told me it wouldn’t be right for me and I wouldn’t be right for it.

I love your Flux by Belew app. Is there a chance you’ll expand upon any of its musical pieces and make extended versions—or will there just be more Flux in general? —Jim McCurdy

Both, yes. Right now, however, time is not on my side because not only am I getting ready for Gizmodrome, but I’m also being asked to do more Celebrating David Bowie shows next year. But any time I have on my own, I dedicate to Flux. I’m always recording things that can be used as snippets, whether I record them on my iPhone or in the studio. I probably have around 18 songs that I haven’t had time to record. But the idea always was not just new material but taking that material and refashioning it. My thought about music is, how come you do a song and that’s the only life it ever has? That’s it? One arrangement, one version? I think that’s cheating your song. I think what you should do, then, is go back, take another look at it, change it, maybe even change some words, change the style, whatever.

There are songs on Flux that are short because that’s kind of the nature of Flux, but I could see taking them and making them longer arrangements. I have an idea in mind that at some point, I’m going to make a record of the songs from Flux. My first solo vinyl record would be songs from Flux, and it would be full-length songs, more like the Gizmodrome record.

What was your involvement in your signature Parker Maxx Fly guitar? —Craig Jones

When I came into the picture, I was using Strats, but they were modified with Roland GK 13-pin MIDI pickups and Sustainiacs. I asked Ken Parker if there was a way we could put those things in a Parker. He told me that when they first put out the Parker Fly, it was designed to be a MIDI guitar, but they left that out because he was afraid it was too revolutionary. When I approached him, I think he felt, This is the time to do it. I helped them upgrade the electronics. I mean, the guitar was designed in the Eighties, and we’re talking about 10 or 15 years later, so I said, let’s put in the MIDI, keep the piezo, make it so you can get a million sounds. Line 6 had just developed the technology for the Variax, so we said, “Let’s put that in there.” I can’t take any credit, though; I just kind of gave them the problems to solve and they did it.

For five days in October 1969, Amougies, Belgium, played host to the Actuel Festival, an open-air music fest. Acts included Pink Floyd, Yes, Ten Years After, the Pretty Things, Keith Relf's Renaissance, Captain Beefheart and a horde of bands you've probably never heard of.

Bringing a bonus layer of weird to the event was its master of ceremonies, the one and only Frank Zappa.

"That was after the Mothers [of Invention] had broken up, and y'know, I had time on my hands," Zappa said several years later. "These people contacted me. They offered me $10,000 to be an emcee at a festival, all expenses paid, and go over there, and, y'know, whatever I wanted to do, and I said, 'Fine.' So, I get there, and they neglected to tell me that nobody spoke English."

They did, however, speak the international language of music (sorry, that was corny)—so Zappa made a point of jamming with several acts on the bill, including Aynsley Dunbar and Pink Floyd. Oddly enough, even though the video below shows Zappa on stage with Roger Waters, David Gilmour and the rest of Pink Floyd, Zappa had no recollection of the jam session. It must've been one hell of a music fest.

Interviewer: [You] performed onstage with Pink Floyd. True or false?

Zappa: Not with Pink Floyd.

...and...

To nail that down once and for all, you did not perform with Pink Floyd, right?

No.

Well, he did. Below, check out Pink Floyd and Zappa jamming their way through an extended version of the former's "Interstellar Overdrive," a brilliant tune from 1967's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason said in 1973, “Zappa is really one of those rare musicians that can play with us. The little he did in Amougies was terribly correct.” See for yourself.

Yesterday, former Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx sat down with Steve Vai to talk riffs, gear and Led Zeppelin on his series, My Favorite Riff with Nikki Sixx.

Vai also tells Sixx some anecdotes about his time working with Frank Zappa, discussing both an instance in which he transcribed one of Zappa's famously lewd stories into a guitar piece, and how Zappa would push his bandmates into challenging, uncharted musical waters.

You can watch the insightful interview, and a longer, even more in-depth follow-up to the interview—"Deeper With Steve Vai"—below.

On June 6, 1971, former Beatle John Lennon performed at New York City's Fillmore East with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

It was a strange night, as you'll see (and hear) in the clip below. For starters, Yoko Ono also "performed" with Lennon and the Mothers.

In reality, all she did was scream her head off, just as she did when Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band performed in Toronto in 1969.

And then there were the odd song choices; they played a little something called "Scumbag," another little something called "Jamrag" and an actual song, Walter Ward's bluesy "Well (Baby Please Don't Go)," which featured Lennon on vocals and Zappa on lead guitar. It was the highlight of the jam, for sure.

"For those of you in the band who have no idea what's about to happen, this is in A minor, and it's not standard blues changes," Zappa says as he introduces "Well (Baby Please Don't Go)." "But it's close." "This is a song I used to sing when I was at the Cavern in Liverpool," Lennon adds. "I haven't done it since."

Zappa's powerful guitar solo starts at 2:05.

If you happen to enjoy what you hear, the performance was released as part of Lennon and Ono's poorly received (and not very good at all) 1972 studio/live album, Sometime in New York City. That said, it's cool to see Lennon—who was back to his 1967-length hair at this point—having fun onstage with his Gibson SG, standing, acting and looking very much like "Beatle John." Enjoy!

Damian Fanelli is the managing editor of Guitar World and Guitar Aficionado. His New York-based band, the Blue Meanies, has toured the world and elsewhere. Fanelli, a former member of Brooklyn jump-blues/swing/rockabilly band the Gas House Gorillas and New York City instrumental surf-rock band Mister Neutron, also composes and records film soundtracks. He writes GuitarWorld.com's The Next Bend column, which is dedicated to B-bender guitars and guitarists. His latest liner notes can be found in Sony/Legacy's Stevie Ray Vaughan: The Complete Epic Recordings Collection. Follow him on Facebook,Twitter and/or Instagram.

Steve Vai has confirmed that he will participate in the upcoming Eyellusion/Zappa Family Trust Frank Zappa hologram tour, explaining his involvement in a lengthy Facebook post.

The initial press release announcing the tour claimed that former Zappa collaborators such as Vai, Adrian Belew (who has since confirmed that he is not, in fact, participating in the tour) and Ian Underwood had "committed" to the tour.

Vai wrote that while the endeavor struck him initially as "odd," he added that he soon began to feel that it "could also be pretty special too."

"A day doesn’t pass that I don’t think about Frank. Nothing could, or ever will take his place in the hearts of the fans, his family and the musicians that have toured with him and loved him," he wrote.

"I believe that the fans understand it’s just an image and that holographic technology has its limitations, but it is an evolution in technology and with an open mind it could be embraced for a worthwhile experience," he added. "I would want to attend this show if I heard about it. If a person can attend the show with their spirit of the love of Frank’s music at the forefront I believe it could be a very touching event for all involved."

Vai said that he will contribute to "3-4 shows" as part of the tour. Over the weekend, Zappa's son, Dweezil—who for years has played his father's music as a part of his Zappa Plays Zappa tours and was also mentioned as a possible participant in the hologram tour press release—confirmed that he would not be involved.

You can read Vai's full statement on the matter here.

Dweezil Zappa—son of legendary guitarist Frank Zappa—has confirmed that he will not participate in the upcoming Eyellusion/Zappa Family Trust Frank Zappa hologram tour.

Shortly after the tour's announcement, Zappa tweeted a clip from the film Goodfellas in which Ray Liotta laughs maniacally. He captioned the clip by saying, “This seems appropriate at this moment in time.”

A user then asked Zappa, “I take it you won’t be in the touring band for this farce?,” to which Zappa simply responded, "You are correct."

Dweezil Zappa was namechecked by his brother, Ahmet, in the press release announcing the hologram tour. Ahmet Zappa said, "How radical would it be to have Moon singing 'Valley Girl' onstage with Frank? Or to see Dweezil side by side with our father playing dueling guitar solos?"

This prompted another user to ask if Dweezil's name had been used in the press release without his permission, to which he simply said, "correct."

The elder Zappa's four children have clashed over the rights to his estate since their mother, Gail, died in 2015. Gail left the rights to the Zappa Family Trust to Ahmet and Diva Zappa, excluding Dweezil and his older sister, Moon.

Dweezil in particular has come into extensive conflict with the Trust over his regular Zappa Plays Zappa tours, with Dweezil even changing the name of his most recent tour to the “50 Years of Frank: Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F@%k He Wants – The Cease and Desist Tour.”

"I feel comfortable playing with Steve Vai," Frank Zappa told Guitar World in 1982. "I mean, I like the way he plays. I think he's really a great guitar player. He does everything on the guitar that I don't do.

"He does all of the stock Stratocaster noises and he makes everything that Van Halen ever dreamed of and then some. He reads music. He plays sixteenth notes, which I don't play. And he does all of this stuff that I don't do; and I think that our styles are kind of complementary.

"He's a good musician and I enjoy playing with him because he's not just a Mongolian string-bender. And he's a thoroughly trained musical person. And I like working with him."

Here's an excerpt of GW's interview with Zappa from the March 1982 issue. For the full interview, head here.

I might be wrong about this, but it seems in the past that the relationship of your guitar to the band was that the band would play and then you would do a solo often with accompaniment. But this time I noticed you did a lot of work with the other guitars, while the other guitarist was playing, at the time, dual solos.
That's an illusion. There is only one point in the show where we play at the same time in linear fashion, and that's in "Stevie's Spanking" [See the video below], and the reason that I drop out for the first part of that is I stay out completely while [Steve] is actually playing his solo because it would distract from him. And then when he's done playing his 32 bars or whatever, then we play together for a little while.

I tend to minimize what I'm playing so he can do all of his Stratocaster extravaganza, bend notes together and stuff like that. That's basically his song. But, the only other place where we do it in the show is in a song called "Teen Age Prostitute" where we have some triple guitar lines. And in "Your Moquna" where there are some triple guitar lines. But, all ofthe rest of the stuff, if I am playing the solo it's with the minimum accompaniment to make it work.

Do you then change your band according to the musicians in it or do you look for the musicians to change the group?
Well, I have ideals I always shoot for but you can't always get what you want. You know, the musicians are chosen by audition. And they come in and tryout against each other to see who gets the job.

Yeah, but do you know what you're looking for in advance pretty much?
Sure.

And then once you find... well, take Steve for instance. Did you realize you would do those kinds of things with him?
Oh, I think I knew that from the first time I heard his cassette. Because his cassette was intelligent and it sounded like he was a person who was interested in music rather than being just a rock and roll star. I like that.