Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive...

"Talkin' it up!/On The Barry Gibb Talk Show/Talkin' about issues/Talkin' about real important issues"
- SNL, "Barry Gibb Talk Show Theme"

Is it just me, or does Howard Kaylan (of Zappa's Flo & Eddie era band, and also from The Turtles)



look like a lost member of the Bee Gees?




or, at least, the SNL version from the "Barry Gibb Talk Show" segment with Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon?



Maybe it's just the beard (and hair, and general look) but it can't just be me. Right? Maybe I'm just crazy. But this is something I kept focusing on during 200 Motels.

Less than Perfect

"I'm not perfect, but I keep trying
Cause that's what I said I would do from the start."
- Hedley, "Perfect"

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/gcpro_audiosolutions_2010summer/#/14

There's something that really stands out to me in this article. Zappa says:

If there is one thing I manage to excel at, it's failure - I manage to fail at 100 percent of the things I do.

Zappa was never 100% satisfied with any of his work, according to this quote. He says that there is never enough machinery or personnel to get things "exactly right". He was his own hardest critic - he strived for perfection in everything he did, and rarely got it (perfection is a very hard thing to achieve!).

I've also noticed that Zappa has always been a very well-spoken man. I've only ever seen one musician who was as well worded (and opinionated) as he was; Marilyn Manson. Both of these men continue to surprise me with the more I learn about how smart they are, and how well-educated they are on the topics they speak about.

I truly believe that Zappa, like he said he would have been if not a musician, could have been a chemist or a physicist. He definitely has the mental capacity for these jobs, and I think he would have been just as innovative in those fields as he was in music.

The Process

"What does he want from me?
What should I try to be?
So many faces all around, and here we go"
- A Chorus Line, "At The Audition"



While I'm sure there are many different videos of people talking about their auditions for Zappa, I was drawn to this one as soon as I saw the name Steve Vai. I was introduced to Steve's music at a young age. When I was 10, I got a CD - Radio Disney: Kid Jams. This featured lots of popular music from the time, but one song in particular stood out for me: Steve Vai's cover of Wipeout. Even without any musical training, I could tell this track didn't belong on the CD - it was far too technical. He was a GREAT guitarist.

Steve, in this video, talks about what the auditioning process was like for Zappa's band (he recorded with Zappa from 1980-1982). Zappa never liked to hear the phrase "I can't do this" or the word "impossible", as Vai recounts. He pushed every one of his band members to their creative limits and expected nothing less than perfection from all of them.

Luckily, Vai made Zappa's cut. He has been called a virtuoso and one of the greatest guitarists alive, due to his knowledge of music and technical skill. Both the 10 year old and 22 year old me agree.

Zappa Musical??

No other road, no other way
No day but today
- "Finale B", Rent



I'm not at all surprised that Zappa would appear on a show as mainstream and well known as Letterman. What's with this musical, though?? I've done multiple google searches on this topic and nothing surfaced - this seems to be the only video or article (that I can find, anyways) that mentions Zappa's Broadway musical. If he was still raising money for it, it's understandable that it never happened - Zappa is very "out there", and people aren't always interested in putting money into something that's not the norm. However, he even had a target date for when it was going to be released! As a fan of Broadway and musicals, I definitely would have gone to see something like this!

The premise is really interesting to me, and the puppet idea has been done recently, so now's the time, I think, for the Zappa Family Trust to release this musical!

Maybe one day, it'll surface? :) In any case, it'll be better than the Spiderman musical!

Something else that shocked me a bit was his story about the policemen who were at his show and danced - he said it gave a whole new dimension to the police force. In everything I've learned and read so far, Zappa has been made out to be very against authority and police in general. It's strange, to me, to hear him personally say otherwise.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

"Promises of fame, promises of fortune
LA to New York- San Francisco back to Boston"
- Belle and Sebastian, "Seymour Stein"

An interesting article my dad found online:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090405/1806484395.shtml

Further proof of how innovative Zappa really was. He was a bit ahead of his time - I don't think that something like this would have worked at the time he was proposing it, as it would be very large-scale and I'm not sure the technology was fully developed at the time - but can you imagine? We'd all be listening (and viewing, if the TV cable idea went through too) to music in a totally different way.

Actually, this kind of sounds like Netflix for music.
Wow.

The Most Beautiful Man in the World

Found a picture of short-shorts guy, for your viewing pleasure. He also appears to be wearing some kind of low-cut onesie under it.

DOES humour belong in music?

"He'll be rewarded for never maturing, for never understanding or learning"
- Bo Burnham, "Art is Dead"

I watched a DVD the other night of a live Zappa show. It's from a much later time period than the one we're covering in class - 1984, to be exact. This wasn't Zappa performing with the Mothers or any incarnation of them since.

The title of the show was "Does Humor Belong in Music?", which is taken from the name of a Zappa album. The songs were very different from what I was used to! There has been a bit of humor in all of Zappa's music, but listening to the lyrics of this show was almost like listening to a comedy album!

Regardless, I really enjoyed it. Since reforming the MoI in favor of more talented and more musically diverse musicians, he had clearly handpicked the best of the best musicians he could find. For instance, the drummer (who I Googled after the DVD) has been called 'one of the greatest drummers of all time' by several critics.

It was a bit strange nonetheless to hear him doing this kind of music. I also noticed that his other band members (particularly Ray White and Ike Willis, as well as some man in short-shorts and a tight shirt whose name I didn't catch) were doing a lot of the work for him. While Zappa played a bit of guitar and contributed some of the vocals, I felt like in the grand scale of things he didn't do much. I did enjoy the other vocalists though, a lot!

An interesting quote from the film to end the post:
"Well, to me a cigarette is food, you see. Now that may be a baffling concept to people in San Francisco who, who have this theory that they will live forever if they stamp out ah, tobacco smoke. I find this a little bit difficult to deal with, but, I live my life eating these things and drinking this black water in this cup here, OK?"

You Make Me Laugh.

"And all that I can do
Is just laugh."
- Nevershoutnever, "I Just Laugh"



Kudos to Zappa for keeping such a straight face. I would never have been able to hold laughter in! As it was, I was sitting down in my basement watching this laughing so hard my family came downstairs to see what I was doing! I DID see Zappa crack a bit of a smirk for some of it - at least he has a sense of humour! This man would have done very well in a staring contest or an improv troupe!

This ties in with my previous posts of Zappa doing anything to get publicity. I would never have pegged him as the game show type! I must say, though, that knowing a bit of background on him now, he incorporates humor into a lot of his work. This game show is definitely a good fit for him!