Announcer (Prague, 1991): [...]

FZ (1991): I'll just show you a chord.
Musician: Yes.
FZ: And we just set up a rhythm on one chord and I'll start doing something. Make it up.
Musician: Okay. Tell me a little bit about the stage.
FZ: Yeah. It's— Look, it's not gonna— It won't be professional. It'll just be music.
Musician: Okay.
FZ: Homemade hoopla.
Musician: Hah hah hah!

Lonnie Lardner (1993): Many have always considered Frank Zappa a rock legend. And one of his friends tonight told me that he wrote and composed music to the very end.

Marc Brown (1993): He was known for elaborate, unconventional songs, often with raunchy lyrics. The social commentary in his songs targeted the music industry, the educational system, and politics.

Jon Snow (1993): In America, Zappa was denounced by the Church, had his concerts broken up by the police, and his records banned by radio stations.

Lonnie Lardner (1993): His wife and all four children were with him. They are together tonight at their Laurel Canyon area home with friends. Frank Zappa, dead at 52. Back to you.

FZ (1985): Rolling?
Cameraman: And . . . yes.
FZ: Okay. This aisle here is where some of the best-known titles lurk. Here's stuff from the Hot Rats. Here's the original 24-track masters of "Dinah-Moe Humm," "Dirty Love," "Montana," "Inca Roads," "RDNZL." Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar, Joe's Garage.

FZ (1985): Here's Sheik Yerbouti.

FZ (1985): Tinsel Town Rebellion, Drowning Witch, Utopia.

FZ (1985): Here's Eric Clapton when he came over to my house. Wild Man Fischer.

FZ (1985): Captain Beefheart. A little jam in the basement. And around here, down this darkened aisle, is a collection of videotapes from when I borrowed my father's 8mm camera and made a bunch of movies.

FZ: I became obsessed with editing. And I would edit just because I liked to edit. I would splice any 8mm film that was in the house to anything else.

Presenter: At Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, the Army Chemical Corp developed the machinery for producing the nerve gas GB, which had been developed by Nazi Germany. And the nerve gas VX, which was developed in England.
Unidentified Man: There is enough gas there and enough gas coming of the nerve gas variety to cause the death of 681,481,000 persons.

FZ: I had a lot of asthma. I was very ill. Almost cacked out a few times from the climate back there. And so, he was looking for a place where I wouldn't be constantly folding up and a place where he could earn a better income. And so, he took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, teaching metallurgy.

FZ: It always seemed to me that if you could get a laugh out of something, that was good.

FZ: And if you could make life more colorful than it actually was, that was good. So, any artist of individual who worked in those two directions was doing something good.

FZ: My family was really poor. Not only that, they didn't like music too much. So I didn't really come into contact with musical expression until 14 or 15 years old. And my parents were opposed to any involvement in music that I might be interested in. But I remember this magazine article about Sam Goody. It was saying what a wonderful merchandiser he was because he could even sell an album that had this ugly music on it.

FZ: The writer described this as, like, literally the most frightening thing that a human being could listen to. This evil, vile album. The description was something that stuck with me, and then a few months later, I actually saw the album in a store and bought it. It was because of that Varèse album that I read about in a magazine, and hearing Ionisation, that I— writing orchestra music. I had no interest in Beethoven, Mozart, or any of that kind of stuff. It just didn't sound interesting to me. I wanted to listen to the man who could make music that was that strange. Because the role of the percussion in most classical music is you wait a long time, and then somebody goes "ping" with a triangle. To me, that was all boring.

FZ: But in Varèse's music, the percussion was playing an integrated melodic part. And it was in the foreground. And since I liked drums, it was a pleasure for me to listen to it.

FZ: I thought it was fantastic. I couldn't understand why people just didn't love it the minute they heard it.

FZ: High school in Lancaster wouldn't be equivalent to high school any place else, because Lancaster was a small town, and very few people in the area liked rhythm and blues music. And the rest of 'em were kind of white-bread, Elvis Presley fanatics types. And I don't even remember how I met Don.

FZ: But he had dropped out of school by that time and spent most of his time staying at home listening to rhythm and blues records, so I used to hang out over there after school and listen to Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown . . .

FZ: And Guitar Slim . . .

FZ: Elmore James . . .

FZ: Lowell Fulson . . .

FZ: And Johnny "Guitar" Watson R&B records, till three o'clock in the morning.

FZ (1973): Went out of my way to get ahold of the rhythm and blues records. And it was very hard to obtain because most of the white music stores didn't stock it, and uh, I just heard that music and I liked it, and couldn't understand why other people didn't like it as much as I did.

FZ: When I first picked the guitar, I said, "How in the world could anybody get any sound out of this thing, other than the open string sound." I couldn't conceive of what the frets were for, but when rhythm and blues came along and I heard examples of blues guitar playing, I thought that it was something I really wanted to do, so I just taught myself how to do it. Once I figured out that the pitch changed when you put your finger down on the fret, I was hell on wheels.

FZ: I had my first group playing other people's material when I was about 16 or 17. It was called The Blackouts.

FZ: A racially mixed ensemble, which did not go down well with the, uh, cowboys and other bigots who lived in this area. And, uh, we managed to play several jobs but . . .

FZ (1973): The school and the city authorities were against having if performed because it was regarded as a threat to the decency of the community.

FZ: I started writing orchestra music before I ever wrote a rock and roll song. And then didn't try writing any rock and roll until I was in my 20s. And as long as a person has to earn a living and if it happens to be a person who makes music, he's going to have to do something to generate an income. An the more humiliating the conditions under which the income is generated, the more the music suffers.

FZ: I did earn my living as a commercial artist for a little while. I did greeting cards, I wrote advertising copy for the place I was working for, called the Nile Running Greeting Card Studio. I talked 'em into letting me do my own line of greeting cards on an experimental basis, and one of 'em was, uh, "Captured Russian photo shows evidence of Americans' presence on Moon first." And you open it up and there's a picture of a lunar crater with "Jesus Saves" inscribed on it.

FZ: I had scored a couple of films about that time. The one that I got paid for, I went out and bought a good guitar and, uh, took over the debts and the assets of a recording studio in a town called Cucamonga, California.

FZ (1973): I'm living in this studio, it doesn't have a bathtub, it doesn't have a shower, doesn't have hot water. I don't have anything to eat except peanut butter, instant mashed potatoes, and coffee. I go around gathering up pop bottles so I can buy cigarettes. But I've got all the electronic stuff I need to make recordings. Well, I had long hair. It was shorter than Beatle hair. So there was a certain amount of resentment in the community for my presence there at the studio. And this mysterious $13.50 an hour recording studio was, uh, bad for their community, so they designed to, uh, get me out of there.

FZ (1991): Eventually this guy came to me and said that he was a used car salesman and that he and the boys were having a party next Wednesday and they would like to have a stag film made. And I said, "Are you kidding?" He said, "Well, we have about 100 dollars." And I said, "Well, I can't make you a movie for 100 dollars, but how would you like a nice tape?"

FZ (1991): So, that night we manufactured a tape which was supposed to be sex on tape, but there's absolutely no sex involved in this thing. But suddenly, the next day, the door swings open and vice squads officers from the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department come blasting in there. Pictures, flash bulbs, and it was right out of a bad movie. They took every tape, every piece of film in the studio as evidence. And I went to jail.

FZ: They sentenced me to six months of jail with all but ten days suspended plus three years' probation.

FZ: I would say that that little escapade there was probably the most informative part of my political training, and I haven't seen anything since that time that would change my opinion about the way stuff really works.

FZ: That's the kind of stuff I had to put up with living in small-town environments.

FZ: I don't have anything against small towns. I think they're wonderful if you like that kind of stuff. But it's very difficult to do the kinds of things that I do in a small-town situation. And the only thing I wanted to do was write music. And so, if I was ever going to hear what I wrote, I would have to put a band together.

Johnny Guitar Watson: He was such a genius in his writing, and he knew so much about all the old music. He was able to marry all of that together, man, it was— I, I haven't heard anything like it before or since.

FZ (Hollywood, 1968?): What ever brought you to Hollywood?
Pamela Zarubica: I came in search of Bob Dylan, and, uh, I came to see The Lovin' Spoonful, and I came to get away from my father, mainly. And then we started living on the streets here because he wasn't too happy about the overall situation. So one night we came in there, expecting to see our favorites, The Grass Roots and Billy Preston, and lo and behold, after two weeks they changed the bill and there was a group called Mothers playing. The main thing I remember is that they played a song that was 20 minutes long and everybody was getting tired dancing in the middle of it. And on the second set that you played you played a song called "How Could I Be Such A Fool?", and I remember listening to that song and thinking I'd never heard it before and I was really surprised. I started thinking to myself, "God, did he write that?" And when I figured out that you had, 'cause I asked you after you came off stage, I was going, "My God, he's got talent. I don't believe it."

Interviewer: Do you think that perhaps you might, uh, in a year or two be the new musical messiah as in The Beatles and Presley ten years ago and ten years before that? Whoever it was.
FZ: I can honestly say that I do not think so.

Announcer: The Mothers Of Invention!

Bunk Gardner: I, I don't remember in all the years with Frank hearing too many bands that had horns. Guitar players, you know, all over the place. Not too many, uh, bands had horns. But, you know, at the same time, I didn't hear any other bands playing Stravinsky or classical music or anything, so, uh, that was fairly unique. And that made me feel good about what we were doing musically. I'm not a weirdo or any of these other things, but when you get around other people that are just naturally funny and do weird things, I ended up just feeling very comfortable. It was exciting in the beginning, it truly was, but of course it was musically difficult. Some nights, Frank would jump up into the air and come down, and he would expect us to know what song he was gonna go into. You know, a perfectionist here, you know. That made an impression that, jeez, well, you know. So it became our duty to engage in, uh, these kind of things that, that, that would make him laugh.

Ian Underwood: The band wasn't specifically anything other than Frank's ideas. And each show was like a composition. And they happened because the band is following his direction.

Ruth Underwood: You know, I used to think, "Okay, he's called me here," and I don't mean in the early days, I mean in full flower of playing with him. We'd talk for a minute and then there isn't even a "Thanks for coming by" or "Okay, see you later." He would just turn the other way and I would be waiting for him to turn back to say, "Oh." But if he turned back it would be, "You still here?" You know, it's like, I was dismissed without even being dismissed. And you could interpret that as being, you know, what a fucking self-centered asshole. But I think that he was just so single-mindedly needing to get his work done.

Bunk Gardner: In the four years I was with Frank he shook my hand once and said, "Good job." I don't ever remember Frank embracing somebody. Maybe that was his environment when he was growing up. So I king of accepted that as, "Don't get too close, okay?" And, uh, I didn't.

Gail Zappa: So, so it was in April of 1966. It was at Los Angeles Airport, actually. I was working as a secretary at the Whisky and there was another girl doing filing, and little did I know that she actually lived with Frank, she shared a house with him. And she got a phone call, and it was Frank, and he said, "Come pick me up."

Pamela Zarubica (c. 1968): The night that I went to pick you up at the airport and I told you that I was bringing this lovely young thing with me—because she was a lovely young thing—and you needed to get some action and you said, "No, come alone." And so I said, "Okay." So I took her with me to the airport. And then we brought you home, we went and got those steaks, and I gave her my black slip to sleep in. And you guys slept in my room 'cause I had the only double bed in the house. And I slept in the couch and waited and took her to work at the Whisky in the morning. It was that weekend and she called on the phone. You said, "Tell her if she wants to fuck to come over." And I said, "Huh, I can't say that to her. You'll have to say it yourself." And so you did, and then she came over and you guys were on the couch fucking.

Gail Zappa: One thing that I'm very clear about is I married a composer. I don't know about whatever he is to anybody else, but to me he was a composer. And you have to be out of your mind to begin with to take it on. There's no guarantee that you're ever going to be able to earn an income. No one cares about what composers do. And everything is against you. Absolutely everything is against you, which makes the odds pretty fantastic.

FZ: The guy who came to see us, Tom Wilson, was having a good time with some girls, and he was dragged to the Whisky à Go-Go to witness one of our songs, which happened to be a blues kind of a number. He said, "Oh. A white blues band. Okay, we'll sign them." And signed the group, and the went right back to the girls.

Bunk Gardner: Now I don't think Wilson heard a lot of the other things, because when we went into the studio he was totally surprised, and I'm sure he wasn't sure whether this was going to sell or not. And we were out there.

Interviewer (1973): Do you consider that your group is just as talented and as skilled as, say, men from a symphony orchestra?
FZ: Oh, I think there are definitely things that this group of musicians can do that you, you wouldn't be able to find symphony musicians to do. Because not only do they manipulate their instruments with great skill, they have to do it all from memory and they have to do it with choreography.

Interviewer (1973): You insist on very high and exacting standards.
FZ: Yeah. I have to insist on them. I don't always get them, but I have to insist on them. I think if you shoot any lower than that you're gonna wind up with something sleazy. So we try and— Like, the parts are real complicated so if you don't stay on it and make sure everything is right you don't get an accurate performance.

Bunk Gardner: Man, we would go in for a minimum eight, ten, twelve hours, I mean, you know, drinking black coffee, ever, he wouldn't stop. I mean, it was, you know, it's like, "God." It didn't matter if it was Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever, man. We were going to rehearse and, you know, make sure that we were ready to play the, the music, because he was just writing all the time. All the time. So we were always introducing stuff. It was, uh, a very unusual approach, I think.

Interviewer: And it must have taken a couple of years for Freak Out to catch on and what was it that picked it up?
FZ: We moved to New York, played five months, six nights a week in this 300 capacity theater, and that made the biggest difference.

FZ: But we were never that popular in Los Angeles. Our market really wasn't the peace, love, hippie type people. That wasn't our market. Hippies did not like us because we didn't do the things that they approved of. Compared to New York, Los Angeles is a very conforming community. When we moved to New York there was virtually no scene at all. There was no long-haired anything there. People looked at us like we were from Venus.

Interviewer: A lot of people have associated you, rightly or wrongly, with the drug culture that came into being in the '60s about the same time as your music first became prominent.
FZ: First of all, I have nothing to do with the drug culture. I don't use drugs, and I don't advise other people to use drugs. And a lot of the things that I think are wrong with the society today are a direct result of people using drugs. It's so prevalent that if you don't use drugs people think you're weird.

Gail Zappa: The Beatles played in Hamburg, and they had their way with this club for months on end. And in a similar way Frank had the Garrick. You get to work out what you want to do. You get to experiment with the audience. You get to really be intimate with an audience. That really helped Frank to perfect what he could get away with on stage.

FZ: The attention to the theatrical side grew when we moved to New York and had to do a show every night. The bulk of what could be classified as theater of cruelty took place at the Garrick Theatre in '67. And that was a unique situation because it was the same people who kept coming back to the theater all the time. It was part of uh, this little routine that we had with the two or three hundred people that made up the audience at the Garrick.

Bunk Gardner: We'd get out and play and Frank would start abusing people in the audience, you know, or calling people up. Or turning his back on the audience, saying, "You know, let's run through this," and ignoring them. And they, they loved it.

Gail Zappa: For Frank, his measure of success is how close did you get to the realization of the idea that you first heard the first time you heard it? If you get anywhere near that, you can call it a success. But most of the time, you never even get close. 'Cause you have to rely on all these other people to do all this other stuff. You know, people like musicians and things like that.

FZ: To do the kind of music theater that we were doing you needed people who weren't afraid to act up on a stage and do ludicrous things. 'Cause that was part of what the music was saying, that the whole worlds was absolutely absurd and so, here it is, we're giving it back to you. In fact, if we hadn't left Los Angeles we would have just evaporated after the first album.

FZ: One, two, three . . .

Ruth Underwood: I was a percussion major at Julliard. I mean, this was back in the times of dynasties in music.

Ruth Underwood: I thought that I would love it, and all of that derailed for me, it just crashed and burned, when I heard my first Frank Zappa concert. I just suddenly realized, "I don't wanna be a timpanist in an orchestra. And I don't wanna be a triangle player in an orchestra." To have to sit in the back row on stage to play my three triangle notes. That was not anything that appealed to me from the moment I heard Frank's music. And it's not that I was inexperienced as a listener with other popular music or music theater or any of that. Frank embodied everything. Everything that showed me in that one concert that I wanted to do that. I would sit in my orchestration classes at Juilliard, in my Baroque History—these classes taught by the greatest people on Earth. One day, I was in one of the piano practice rooms and I was absolutely not even allowed to be there because "That's just for the pianists." And there I would be, trying to recall the melody or the melodic shape of "Oh No." Nobody was there, and on this fabulous grand piano I played that piece to the best of my recollection. And I can't tell you, probably withing 30 seconds, an officer of the school came in, "What are you doing?" "I'm just playing this beautiful music." "Doesn't sound like any music you're supposed to be playing here." And I said, "It's 2oth-century music. What are you talking about? It's by a living composer." "Get out." And if you were to hear that piece on the piano, it could live in a concert hall. It was that type of music that he could produce that was a product of everything that was in him. But you couldn't really categorize it. You couldn't say, "Oh yeah, that's rock and roll," 'cause it wasn't. "It's jazz." No, it really wasn't. "It's pop music." No, not at all. Well, what the hell is it? It's Zappa.

Ruth Underwood: And I knew that it had changed my life. That's the thing. I didn't live my life and then look back on it and go, "Yeah. That was the life-changing moment." I walked out of that theater and I was actually disoriented. I, my whole world had been shaken up.

Bunk Gardner: You know, when you look at stuff now, I mean, everything goes. And it also brings to mind, because we played with Lenny Bruce, you know, how difficult it was in terms of your language, uh, that people would not accept.

Mike Keneally: Lenny Bruce had a, an incredible impact, an incredible influence, but, you know, Frank's influence was really, really strong.

Mike Keneally: And, and it instantly just, like, made a beeline for the most influential archetypes and figureheads in rock music. You know, if you listen to Sgt. Pepper it was obvious that The Beatles knew what, what was going on with Frank.

Mike Keneally: They've explicitly said that Sgt. Pepper was "our attempt to make our own Freak Out!" And the inner spread of the album, whether Frank liked it or not, was powerful and iconic and, and, you know, the, the record company were not wrong in terms of making an impact. It definitely made an impact.

Mike Keneally: But Frank didn't think of it. So there's a part of him that just bristled, because it wasn't his baby, you know. And on the second album, he put his foot down.

Mike Keneally: Not only was he in charge of, of the artwork, and he did his own collage on the back cover, but if he had had the time and inclination he could have continued on doing his own album artwork and, and it would have been fascinating.

Mike Keneally: But I think when Cal Schenkel crossed his path and he saw somebody that got what he was doing and could capture it and could also focus on it exclusively while, you know, Frank would look over Cal's shoulder and say, "Try that, try that." Frank just hands him his head, and you get just amazing cover after amazing cover.

Mike Keneally: And that, it's beautiful 'cause they built a world together. Those album covers plays into that thing of feeling like you're part of an alternative movement.

FZ: There had already been two other Sgt. Pepper parodies by the time that our package was ready.

FZ: And MGM was panic stricken that they would be sued by The Beatles and wanted legal assurance that The Beatles weren't going to harm them for putting this package out. And all the legal gyrations took about 13 months.

FZ: I know I talked personally to McCartney at one time and said that, you know, "The record company is panic stricken over this, and can you do anything to help me?" And it was like he was on the other end of the line, taking the phone and going, "You mean, you talk about business?" Like, "Oh, we have lawyers who do that." He just had no interest in participating in a discussion of the legal ramifications of a parody of the Sgt. Pepper cover. That was at a time when it was very, very unfashionable to be a businessman or even to have any contact to the world of commerce. I mean, people were living in a dream world. How did they expect to earn a living doing their music if they didn't have some idea that the people who were distributing it were only there to steal from them? Most of the artists that I knew were too busy getting ripped. If you just got high and went out and did your groovy music and, you know, then there were business people who took care of that other stuff.

FZ: I wasn't in the United States when Moon was born. I was on the road. As I walked out the door to get on the bus, I said, "Well, if it's a girl, name it Moon, and if it's a boy name it Motorhead."

Ed Herlihy: In California, actor Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Reagan arrive to cast their votes in the state's primary election. He's the Republican nominee for governor. It's his first political contest.

Gail Zappa: Reagan was the governor of California and there was a freak contingent starting in L.A. at the time, and in those days, if you had long hair in this town and you were driving a car, it was such an infrequent occurrence that people would actually wave to each other. That's how—what a tight, what a small and tight community it was.

Pamela Des Barres: Well, Frank was considered by everyone on the strip and all the people in the clubs to be sort of the, I mean, the ersatz Pied Piper of Laurel Canyon. He was right in the center of it in the log cabin, which was Tom Mix's old cabin, with his horse buried under the bowling alley.

Pamela Des Barres: People can't believe these kind of things. With Houdini's house right across the street.

Pamela Des Barres: And he, he was this centrifugal force of Laurel Canyon.

Pamela Des Barres: Any kind of rock star, especially the British guys who came to town, wanted to meet Frank. So, we would, you know, meet these rock stars, and they right away would say, "Can we meet Zappa?"

Pamela Des Barres: So, of course, Jagger was there, the Stones, and all the local bands too, but Jeff Beck, I mean, anybody you can think of at that time. It was the center of the world at that point.

Pamela Des Barres: Frank suggested, since he had started a record label, that we actually become our own group. It was very ra— unusual. I mean, there were no rock— girl rock bands at all or rock groups. We didn't play any instruments. And he wanted us just to capture our lives in Laurel Canyon, on the Strip. He thought we had something to say. He always liked to preserve moments in time.

Pamela Des Barres: Well, early, early days, I did not notice any messing around. When, when Moon was a little baby and then she got pregnant with Dweezil and she insisted they leave that scene.

Pamela Des Barres: I remember that. Okay, that's it. She, she was having another kid. And, uh, you know, I don't think she liked it. She didn't. In fact, I know she didn't like it, but she knew about it.

Pamela Des Barres: And he did include her in, in almost everything that, that he was doing. She was right there at all times.

Gail Zappa: I'll tell you the secret to keep maintaining a relationship, apart from the hideous, uh, occupational hazards, that in— that are specific to rock & roll, um, which can throw you for an— take you on an emotional rollercoaster if you let if from time to time, but, the main thing is don't have those conversations. So, Frank does what he does, and I do what I do.

Ruth Underwood: You know, I used to have an expression in my own mind about it, "A polarity of passions." Two different worlds there, and it's sometimes very uncomfortable because he couldn't fucking wait to get out of the house and go on the road. But then, he was also very happy to come home, just to feel safe again.

Gail Zappa: One of the reasons why I said, "Let's get the fuck out of here," because Manson had set up shop in the mountain behind us at the log cabin. There was this trail that was maybe ten feet from the bedroom window, and every morning I would see their feet cruising around the neighborhood. They were creepy. I mean, the thing about the '60s, you just know stuff. You don't know why you know it, but you just know it. You feel it. It's, it's just in the air, and I remember that.

Reporter: The family's leader, Charles Manson, denied that they were a violent group.

Gail Zappa: I don't know if previous generations felt that, but I know we did. Whoever was alive then did.

Alice Cooper: The way we met was that I met Miss Christine from the GTOs. And they knew we were looking for a contract and, and they knew Frank was just starting his own label. And we were this little band coming to L.A. to try to make it.

Alice Cooper: Not knowing that he was going to be our savior. Every record company turned us down except for Frank. It was weird. He had the freaks, and he had the very, extremely intelligent and the very artsy people behind him. And then there was the whole middle that didn't get it.

The left-behinds
Of the Great Society

Interviewer: You formally disbanded The Mothers in 1969. Why?
FZ: Because it was a disaster. We were doing a tour. The tour wasn't successful. At the beginning I took $400 out of my bank account so I could eat. And by the time the tour was over, after paying everybody and everything, I was $10,000 in debt. And it just seemed to me that this was not the, a lifestyle I wished to continue.

FZ (live 1968): Hey! That sounds like shit. Want to get a level on this before we actually make it?

Bunk Gardner: When we first went out to play, after the concert, we wanted to know if we were actually going to get paid. There was always that kind of, "Wow, what's going on financially?" So, we didn't even get a two-week notice. And, and I remember saying, "I just bought a new Chevy," whatever. You know. So, no. It was totally out of the blue. Totally.

Mike Keneally: I think that Frank realized, "Wow. I just wanted to create something, and I wanted to make a statement artistically," but there's people relying on you.

Mike Keneally: There's people expecting paychecks. And then Frank is like, "This isn't fun for me anymore. I don't want to feel as though I'm responsible for the, the happiness and livelihood of, of a bunch of other people. All I want to do is, is make statements and, and see how they sound."

FZ: Most of what occurred after that, the groups were not as permanent. They didn't have the same kind of personality as the early Mothers. The one that followed on after that 1969 batch was the group with Mark and Howard. And it had an identity.

FZ: They had been in a group called The Turtles, but I guess The Turtles had broken up. And I had done a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and they came to the concert and we decided that I would put together another touring band called The Mothers and go out and do amusing things.

FZ: We were redefining the expectations of entertainment. But it seemed to me there was no reason why that audience shouldn't experience some of the things that had already happened since 1920 in musical development. Things that they were completely unaware of just because they were a, quote, quote, rock audience, and therefore deprived of musical experience. It wasn't being presented to them in any kind of music appreciation class in school.

FZ: Unfortunately, there were some people who thought that it was bad because nothing should change real rock & roll. And anybody who would interfere with that kind of aesthetic was viewed as a threat and needed to be disposed of. And basically, my career has been, year after year, waiting to disposed of.

Interviewer (Sweden, 1978): How do you know about success?
FZ: How do I know about success? I don't know. I watched The Beatles in the '60s, I guess that's success.

Mike Keneally: You pretty much couldn't find a, a more pristine example of somebody at the absolute pinnacle of mainstream musical success who decides, "Wow! This is bullshit!"

John Lennon (Fillmore East, 1971): I'd just like to say hello.

Mike Keneally: And so, when Lennon and Zappa finally crossed paths in some ways it gave John and Yoko's artistic expression a framework that they never really enjoyed in, in any other context. And in some ways, makes more sense when the imprimatur of Frank and The Mothers are surrounding them.

Alice Cooper: I really think Frank was afraid to have a hit record. Because I think Frank could have written hit records all day. And he purposely sabotaged a lot of his records. It was interesting, 'cause everybody was going for the hit record and he never did.

Ian Underwood: That makes absolutely no sense to me. But I don't disagree with it because I, I think that that's probably correct, but I don't think Frank was— had any interest whatsoever in writing any, any hit tunes. That's not even on his radar.

Ruth Underwood: This man was just a walking mass of contradictions, and yet—now I'm going to contradict myself—at the same time, he was very consistent with those contradictions.

Steve Vai: My perspective of it has changed through the years. Because when I was in it, I was a tool for the composer and, and as— is all of his musicians. And he used his tools, uh, brilliantly. It's like, whatever you can do that's interesting and unique it's going to be exaggerated and used as he deems fit for his music.

Ruth Underwood: Frank would often appear to be cold, aloof, and not personally involved with his trained monkeys as once he joked about. We're just all trained monkeys, right? He's the circus ringleader or whatever. But I want to tell you that he had great feelings for us. He was, he was human. There were times when I didn't feel that he was so much. And I did feel he was cruel at times. But he was a passionate man. And he developed real love—I'm not going to say equally for everybody. But the people that he loved, he kept bringing back over and through many of the bands. Many of the tours.

Gail Zappa: Frank was very loyal to the people that had helped him along the way even if they were the worst motherfuckers. He would, um, go out of his way to help them.

Gail Zappa: And I can count on one hand the friends that he truly would spend time with.

Gail Zappa: He was pretty forgiving for someone that he knew, but if he didn't know you, one chance, that's it. Done. You know, so he could be hardcore as well.

Gail Zappa: First of all, he was not injured, he was attacked. This myth about him falling off the stage, that didn't happen. Some idiot attacked him and threw him off the stage.

Interviewer (c. 1974): And I know a lot of people know something happened to you and essentially it was that a person of somewhat demented condition, apparently, had pulled you off the stage at a place called the Rainbow Theatre in London and you were knocked unconscious and pretty seriously injured. And I know you were in a wheelchair a long time after that. Uh, there's been a lot of talk about some of the things that happened to The Mothers as a result of that accident but I'm wondering what, if anything, it did to you. Did it affect your thinking? Did it change any of your perspectives?
FZ: Oh, certainly. Of course. It helps you to find out who your friends are. Try sitting in a wheelchair for nine months. You'll find out who your friends are. The point that I was in the hospital, you have a bunch of guys who earn their living from touring and I was unable to tour for the bulk of that year. So I'm used to being active and traveling around and having a good time. And so, if you're sitting there and you are an invalid against your will, uh, it does change your outlook a little bit.

Bruce Bickford: The nose is the important part when you're making a Zappa head. 'Cause no one else has one like it. It doesn't have ears, but that's because they wouldn't be seen once you get the hair on. But the hair is actually the, the simpler part of this whole thing. You can see here how easily the hair goes on.

Interviewer: How did you find the animator, Bruce Bickford?
FZ: I was sitting here with a broken leg and he climbed over my fence with two reels of film under his arm. Now, this is tough 'cause the fence used to be pretty high, but he made it.

Bruce Bickford: I hitchhiked up to Laurel Canyon and then found his house. We looked at the stuff and he was impressed by the number of figures that I could sustain in animation in one shot.

FZ: As far as I can tell, he's the best ever. And he wanted to know if I could help him. I was sitting in the basement and here's this guy with this footage. And he's been on my payroll ever since.

Mike Keneally: Motherfucker throws Frank off the stage, and whether frank likes it or not, that's a huge marker for a new phase. He's got to convalesce, and what do you do if you're Frank Zappa with that brain and you can't move and you can't get up? He's got a restless, creative mind so he's going to start creating.

Bruce Bickford: Uh, at times he, he was stubborn. We wer gonna make a movie and all he could think about was control. His control. He had some emotions that ran deep that he wouldn't express.

Bunk Gardner: I just accepted everything rather than questioning, "Why are you like you are?" But I could see the workaholic, and that was where his joy was coming from.

Mike Keneally: I think that Frank didn't, like, express himself as directly in terms of his own emotions. I don't think he saw that as his purpose.

Bruce Bickford: He had so much talent. It defied everything.

Mike Keneally: When something cataclysmic happens in your life, there's any number of ways you can deal with it. You can just go, "Oh, my God, why me?" and be capsized. Or you can say, "Well, I got no choice in the matter here. Something has changed." He's not going to continue employing a group while he's convalescing, so that version of The Motehrs scatters, starts doing their own things. And as soon as he's able to write, wheel to the rehearsal studio, get some of the horn players in there, put the charts in front of him, hear what things sound like, end up with a stack of new compositions, go out on the road, surprise people yet again.

Scott Thunes: I think at every point in his life, he was trying to do the best thing that he could to have no regrets.

Scott Thunes: But what was Frank honestly trying to do? He didn't give a shit about the immediate of his, of his attempting to function in the way that he chose to function, which was, "If I'm alive, I've got to be in the studio. I've got to be at the music paper."

FZ (1982): My desires are simple. All I want to do is get a good performance and a good recording of everything that I ever wrote so I can hear it. And if anybody else wants to hear it, then that's great too. Sounds easy, but it's really hard to do.

Steve Vai: Frank was a slave to his inner ear. So he heard things a particular way and then he tried to manifest them in the world, but there were limitations. And there's financial limitations to a degree when you're dealing with orchestra pieces. And there's performance limitations, you know? You can just write something that somebody can't play, you know.

Steve Vai: But the music needed to resemble what he was hearing in his head. So this led to a lot of I think suffering on his part due to the inadequacies and limitations of others, you know. Sorry, Frank.

FZ (1973): We rehearse all the time. Every day before we play, we rehearse. We'll, we'll rehearse, uh, before this tour, we rehearsed for three weeks, four days a week, five hours a day.

Steve Vai: A lot of people think, "Oh, he was very demanding." No more demanding than anybody that has a job that they need to do.

Steve Vai: But it would be really difficult for a musician in Frank's band if he was asking you to do things that you couldn't do. But he always asked you to do things that he believed you can do, but maybe you didn't. "Black Page" was a piece of music that Frank wrote. It's probably, um, at the foref—, forefront of innovation in regard to rhythmic polymetric notation. No doubt. No doubt. Because there's certain rhythmic situations in that piece that are extraordinarily complex, but the important thing is it sounds like a beautiful piece of music. It's unique. It's a comp— and it's nothing like anything else in his catalog. This is Frank, you know. And so "The Black Page" is this piece of music that was like this, um, phenomenon to me and to many others.

Ruth Underwood: There was no doubt that there was a person who could write music, fantastic music, who cared that it be played properly. And what I'm hearing was put on this Earth for me. It was for me. That music is there for as long as we have any kind of, uh, appreciation for the arts. The music that Frank made I think will last.

Producer: You guys fucking nailed that! Yeah. That was good.

Interviewer: Now that you are becoming a successful man on— in the music scene, what consequences could this probably have for you?
FZ: I don't think about it. A lot of times, the people like what you do for the wrong reasons.

FZ: Uh, well, that was their idea of something funny. I think they actually did it just to make fun of me, you know, because, you know, what their orientation is all about.

FZ: I thought the whole skit sucked myself, and, uh, I was just stuck doing it. They wouldn't let me write anything for the show.

Mike Keneally: There was a part of him that even though he had a lot of people's attention, of feeling cynical about the fact that, yeah, all these people are, are looking but they don't know what they're seeing.

Ray White: Sometimes truth, when you put truth up, really quickly, like, "Here's the truth," uh, it's like, uh, uh, um, daylight to a vampire. You know what I'm saying? Some people are used to avoiding truth. When someone puts it right on the table, don't bring that plate out here again. And d0n't play the music that the guy that eats off that plate on the radio. He don't— not only thinks, he discerns. We got to keep this guy under check, you know? 'Cause he can't be out there. And that's just my eyes seeing it as a black man in America. Anybody that comes from the outside, or so-called outside, with ideas and new thoughts, and you see this unknown hand just go like this and brush you aside.

Gail Zappa: In those days, record companies had a lot more control over artists. Typically, what a record company would do is like sort of, they would get it— they were getting closer and closer to 360 deals, which means they own all the parts of you around your asshole and everything else that goes with. So, Frank wanted to do a box set. They said, "No, nobody can do box sets. That's insane." So then he took the box set apart and made four albums out of it. He went over to Warner's and he just handed them over and said, "Okay, we're— I'm done. That's the end of my contract. Here's your four albums." And that changed everything from that point on. But more than that, he's the first artist to go completely independent. You know, we set up our own label.

Mike Keneally: As Frank and Gail get into the Zappa Records phase, and, you know, one of the first albums that come out, Sheik Yerbouti, which is a very successful album.

Mike Keneally: And it's got crowd-pleasing, really filthy shit on it, but, you get into the subject matter of that record, and it's still dark. He's still in that dark place. Almost every song on that record is just like attacking a specific group of people.

Interviewer: You always were a renegade against the music business. Why?
FZ: Because most of what the music business does is not musical.
Interviewer: How many lawsuits do you have out now, Frank?
FZ: Probably about nine.
Interviewer: Nine lawsuits against some of the most famous record companies in Los Angeles.
FZ: That's true.

Steve Vai: Besides the incredible freedom of his creative perspectives, his business perspectives were very independent. I mean, he started his own label back in the day when this was relatively new and he was sort of at the forefront in a sense, and that was very vital to their, you know, organization and their income.

Gail Zappa: By 1982, we had started a small mail-order company, and we did, like, a million dollars' worth of sales. For us, that was good business because you only had to sell a quarter as many records really to make the same amount of profit.

Gail Zappa (1987): This is where all the fan mail comes in. This is where I read it, and if you don't believe me, look around you. There's boxes, and I read everything.

Gail Zappa: In retrospect, people think you're a genius. But while it's happening, you're just, "Okay, now what?" And it's just an, an idea comes to you, and then you go for it.

Ronald Reagan (1979): Good evening. I'm here tonight to announce my intention to seek the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

Mike Keneally: With the onset of Reaganism and what was happening in the country at that time, in some ways, I think that drew Frank out of the more solipsistic darkness of what was happening in his career.

FZ: This is the dawning of the dark ages again as far as I'm concerned. Never have the arts been in such bad shape in the United States.

FZ: The business of music is all about this fake list of who sold what. The whole idea of selling large numbers of items in order to determine quality to it is what's really repulsive about it.

Adam Curry: MTV's Top 20 Video Countdown is sponsored by Burger King and by Three Musketeers.

FZ: The record industry decided this is the wave of the future. And they started signing only groups who look good. And the whole idea was making picture music. When the music business was still sort of about recording songs, you could have a hit record if it caught on in one of 10,000 different radio stations in America. Now, instead of having 10,000 chances to make a hit, you got one.

Neil Armstrong: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Steve Vai: Even in the most ugliest chord he ever wrote, there's always a ray of hope in there, you know.

FZ (1981): As an entertainer, I'm responsible for delivering the best of what I can do to the audience that has bought a ticket to see it or buys a record to hear it.
Sandi Freeman: And what about your friends? Your neighbors? Your family?
FZ: Well, I don't have any friends. I have a wonderful wife and four children. I like them. They're my friends.
Sandi Freeman: So, your wife is your friend?
FZ: Right.
Sandi Freeman: When you're not working, do you just sort of cut yourself off from the rest of the world and you're with your family?
FZ: Well, when I'm not touring, I'm at home. I have a studio in my house. I do my recording there. And when I'm done doing that part of my work, I go off on the road and travel around and do this kind of stuff.

Diva Zappa: They're here.

Dweezil Zappa:
And we need a new burden.

Ahmet Zappa:
It's coming at you.

Pamela Des Barres: The kids didn't get to see that much of him. Just the way it goes. He was on a mission, and he was going to accomplish that mission no matter what.

Mike Keneally: Well, the sweet thing about "Valley Girl" is that it was Frank and Moon in the studio. Them, you know, connecting. Undoubtedly having a good time even though it was the result of Moon, you know, putting a note under, you know, Frank's studio door, saying, "Hi, my name's Moon. I live in the same house as you. Uh, j— just in case you're, you're interested, I do this Valley Girl voice."

Mike Douglas: It was nearly 15 years ago when the Beach Boys brought national attention to California girls. These days, another kind of California girl is being immortalized on record. There's a song getting heavy airplay on Southern California rock stations called "Valley Girl."

FZ (1982): Hi. You're probably wondering what we're doing right now. Well, you see, we have this problem. We have this record called "Valley Girl," and all these assholes keep calling up and asking for interviews and photographs. So, in the middle of the night, we have to sit on the roof and stand out here and move around and do dumb things so that the world's most famous photographer, Norman Seeff, can take pictures of this crap for Life magazine. That's what we're doing here.

FZ: "Valley Girl" was a very unusual accident in the U.S. We were a small label distributed through CBS. Nobody at CBS had any idea that that thing would catch on the way it did. The way it happened was my daughter took and acetate of "Valley Girl" to a station in Pasadena called KROQ and as soon as they played it, the phone started ringing and it became an instant hit. People loved it right away.

Moon Zappa: Like, oh, my God!

FZ: Meanwhile, I'm in Europe on a tour. I don't even know I've got a hit record. In 1982, you couldn't walk around in the United States without hearing something about "Valley Girl."

Richard Hart (1982): Next on Channel Five, it's awesome 'cause we're going to, like, crank with the whole Zappa family. For sure. Totally on Evening News.

Pamela Des Barres: And that was his first big hit.His only big hit. But it really came out of Moon wanting to spend time with her dad.

Richard Hart (1982): What's happening in the future now? Have you— Are you planning a follow-up right away to cash in on the, uh, the audience's receptivity, or . . .
FZ: No. As a matter of fact, the next thing that I'm going to do is go out to, um, Cal-Arts tonight and hear a couple of piano players give a performance of some of my orchestra music.

Mike Keneally: So, there's "Valley Girl." A success, mainstream success. But to Frank it's, it's like, "Okay, what can I do now? I've got people's attention."

FZ (1982): One, two, three . . .

David Harrington: From everything I'd heard, and heard about Zappa, it just seemed like he should write for Kronos.

Hank Dutt: Yeah. So, if we can play those longer, I think that will be more effective.
David Harrington: How I— uh, what length?
Hank Dutt: I have a quarter note tie into . . .
David Harrington: Oh, I see.
Hank Dutt: It's very strange sheet music.

David Harrington: I think the first time we spoke was after a concert. I'm thinking '82, '83. Shortly after that is when he began to write, uh, the new piece for us.

David Harrington: I always appreciated the fact that he taught himself. He went to the library as a kid, and he just checked out books and stayed there and learned. For me, that's been a big inspiration. When I think of Zappa's life's work, I'm reminded of Charles Ives, Harry Partch, Sun Ra. These are American experimentalists that totally reimagined the way music might be heard, might be composed. And Zappa belongs in that tradition.

Linda Alexander (1983): Tomorrow night, the London Symphony Orchestra are giving a concert at their home at the Barbican Centre. The program of orchestral music they'll be playing is music written by the celebrated American rock star Frank Zappa. Robin Denselow has been looking at the least known and the least commercial side of Zappa's art.
Robin Denselow: Frank Zappa has been quietly writing pieces for a full orchestra alongside his rock work for years. For their first ever performance, he's using the London Symphony Orchestra. The conductor, Kent Nagano, was chosen by Zappa.

Fran Morrison (1983): Do you expect to actually make any money out of the concert and the recordings that you've come here to make with the L.S.O.?
FZ: No. No.
Fran Morrison: Why then do you do it?
FZ: Well, I think that any artistic decision that is based on whether or not you're going to make money is not really an artistic decision. It's a business decision. And there are a lot of things that I can do to earn a living and a lot of things that I have already done to earn a living, which have produced the amount of, uh, capital needed to do this project. I came here to spend money on an English orchestra to record my music so I can take it home and I can listen to it. And if somebody ele likes that kind of stuff, I will make it available on a record so they can hear it. That is my part of the public service of spending the money to make this event happen. No foundation grant, no government assistance, no corporation, no committee. Just a crazy guy who spent the money to hire English musicians to do a concert at the Barbican and make an album for Barking Pumpkin Records.

David Letterman (1983): How do you get the London Symphony Orchestra to do your stuff?
FZ: You pay them.
David Letterman: Yeah. But isn't this a really prestigious organization?
FZ: Of course. So you pay them a lot of money.
David Letterman: Yeah.

FZ (1983): It's just as serious to write a song like "Valley Girl" as it is to write the ballet called Mo 'N Herb's Vacation. To me they're equally serious problems in music.

FZ (1983): Unless they have sufficient time to rehearse it, the chances of an absolutely perfect performance are not good.
David Letterman: Now, uh, how close did you get?
FZ: I would say that we're up to about 75% on this record.

Kent Nagano (1983): So, you, could you take a look, please, at 159?

Robot: The inhabitants here do not have the intelligence to be utilized anymore. So man built me.

FZ: Human beings are expensive. If given the choice between not making music at all or making music in a medium that a person can afford, I will make music in a medium I can afford. Ergo, the machine.

FZ: I had bought the Synclavier and started doing all the composition in that medium, because you can write it the way you want, and you get to conduct it also. Even have it executed at any speed or any amplitude. You can control all the nuances of the performance. I would rather do it myself than give it to somebody else to do.

Dweezil: Okay, Ahmet. Stop the game, and I want to— and have him get some pictures of you with the clay.
Ahmet: I don't have any clay. Thanks.
Dweezil: There's 1,000 pounds of it around here someplace.
Moon Unit: There's 1,000 pounds right behind you, Ahmet. Don't lie.
Ahmet: What do you want me to build?
Dweezil: Whatever you want.

FZ (1989): It's not easy to keep converting capital from doing other things and to reinvesting in it to doing that kind of stuff because there's no way that the music that I'm working on is gonna pay its own way. But I would rather do it this way than to rely on a government or to rely on, uh, you know, a king or a duke or somebody who, you know, wants to take drastic action if he doesn't approve of your work of art. You know, forget that.

David Raksin (1989): Do you still think that music students in universities are studying a dead language in a dead institution by dead professors, and would you explain why?
FZ: Well, yes. Because a lot of times, uh, composers will come to me, and they'll say, "Well, what do I do?" And I tell them, "Get a real estate license, because if you expect to write music in the United States, what are you gonna do for a living?" If you want to be a composer in the United States, you must write for the media. You can't just write music because you're writing music. You have to have some other kind of a job to support your habit. And, uh, it's a sad story, but it's true.

FZ (1984):
'Cause what they do
In Washington
They just takes care of Number One
An' Number One ain't you
You ain't even Number Two

Announcer (1985): This is ABC News Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

Ted Koppel (1985): A lot of people, and they are becoming increasingly vocal, find the songs and the rock video performances that go with them offensive.
Jeff Greenfield: One group of parents has heard more than enough. The Parents Music Resource Center wants a labeling system for albums and tapes, much like movies are rated today. Later this month, a Senate committee will hold hearings on the question. A tribute to the clout of the center, whose members include Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker.
Susan Baker: "Guess you could say she was a sex fiend. I met her in a hotel lobby, masturbating with a magazine."
Jeff Greenfield: Frank Zappa is one of the few rock artists to come out openly against the labeling effort.
FZ: I mean, if it looks like censorship and it smells like censorship, it is censorship no matter whose wife is talking about it. It's censorship.
Ted Koppel: The analogy you draw is a . . .

Mike Keneally: Frank was being called upon by Ted Koppel and CNN . . .

Mike Keneally: . . . and Larry King . . .

Mike Keneally: . . . and a lot of mainstream news outlets to come on and talk about this stuff.

Mike Keneally: Well, he had cleaned up his act sartorially so much that he was no longer visually the freak from the '60s.

Mike Keneally: He was somebody that understood that "If I'm gonna do battle with these people, I need to kike, uh, come to them on their turf."

FZ (1985): And they're taking a right away from him.

Gail Zappa: Frank became to go-to person for comments to deal with record rating because nobody else in the record industry showed up.

FZ (1985): I think that they're probably concerned about airplay, and they're probably concerned about their careers, and they're probably concerned about, uh, you know, taking a chance and opening their mouth. But I don't speak for them. I don't speak for the rest of the record industry. I speak as a private citizen, as a middle-age Italian father of four. I got concerns here about what's gonna happen to the right to have free speech and right to assemble and the right to have somebody use your own words against you in a legal situation. And nobody is sticking their neck out to say that it's all a bunch of crap.

Mike Keneally: Frank would say it was a failure because it still ended up with the Parental Advisory sticker on the thing. But I think he made a difference there. There were times that I wished that he could modulate his approach a little bit with a little bit less anger.

FZ (1985): Sex equals sin.

Mike Keneally: But that anger resulted in some wonderful moments like the Crossfire with James Lofton.

James Lofton (1986): Do you think the founding fathers really had the First Amendment, that they gave us, the First Amendment to defend songs that glorify Satanism and incest and suicide? Do you really believe that?
FZ: Absolutely.
James Lofton: You really believe that?
FZ: Yeah, I believe it.
James Lofton: You're an idiot then.
FZ: Yeah?
James Lofton: You're an idiot.
FZ: Well, I'll tell you what. Kiss my (BLEEP). How do you like that, buddy?
James Lofton: Well, take your teeth out.

Arsenio Hall (1989): I was surprised to see you heading the protest. Why wasn't someone like Prince involved with you in that? I mean . . .
FZ: He should have been involved in it, but I think that it's his right to keep his mouth shut. It's also Bruce Springsteen's right to keep his mouth shut and anybody else that they went after. They never attacked my lyrics. They attacked those people. They even went after Michael Jackson.
Arsenio Hall: But you fought real hard for these people, and it was never your music involved. That's the thing that shocked me.
FZ: It's the principle of the thing. We live in a country where we're supposed to be free. Take a look at what happened in China. You got a bunch of kids there who want democracy. They don't even know what it is. We supposedly have it here, what do we do? Sit around and go, "Hmm, hmm, let somebody else take care of it for me."

Scott Thunes: From the very beginning, there wasn't literally anything like it. As musicians, that was the way that we spoke to each other. Like, instead of quoting movies, we quoted Zappa.

It's about truth
Truth

Scott Thunes: And it wasn't until I started playing with him that I realized that he was fucking with America as much as he was fucking around with music. Like, America was just another canvas for him to do his shit on.

Scott Thunes: How did he see himself in a world that was literally going mad? He saw the big picture. I cannot imagine in any way it could keep a man like him down. If anything, he would battle up until the last drop of his blood was shed. Overrun by orcs, he doesn't give a shit. You cannot live your life as if you are about to not be able to do your life anymore, you know?

Reporter: Czechoslovakia today became the latest of the countries of Eastern Europe once held so tightly in the Soviet grip to throw off its hardline Communist yoke.

FZ (1993): I guess it was about a year before the Velvet Revolution when I was visited here by a Czech composer.

FZ (1993): And through the interpreter, he indicated that he wanted to play some of my music and wanted me to come to Prague for the concert. I thought, well, the chances of me doing that were pretty unlikely because Czechoslovakia was pretty grim. And the next thing I knew, they had this revolution, and this composer was a member of parliament.

FZ (1993): And I'd already made four trips to the Soviet Union and had been trying to develop some East-West international trade.

FZ (1990): Boy, is it cold here.

FZ (1993): And I arranged to come to Prague on my way back to the United States from Moscow. And it was during my Prague visit, I proposed to them that if they needed some sort of representation in the West to help them get investment or whatever they needed to do, that I would be interested in doing that.

FZ (1993): So, when I got off the plane, there was 5,000 people waving at me. And, uh, you know, never before in my life had I seen anything like that. Hah hah hah. Get off the plane and, you know, there's a lot of people, but there's no police, and there's no bodyguards. There's no nothing. Just people waving at you. That's nice until you go through the airport and they start piling on you. And to get from the door of the airport to the minibus that was going to take us to the hotel took about 40 minutes.

Gary Iskowitz: When Frank was there, it was like, Frank was the President of the United States coming to visit. And Frank was trying to figure out why was everyone there so happy to see him. And evidently, in Czechoslovakia, when young kids played rock music, the police would tell 'em, "Turn off that Frank Zappa music." And all of a sudden, here's Frank Zappa. He was a symbol of this freedom, which is incredible when you think about it. He had that kind of effect.

David Dondorf: It was like the king of freedom had showed up. I mean, Frank was shocked.

Kathleen Sullivan (1990): Rock musician Frank Zappa, who's always been something of a maverick, has just returned from a trip to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. And in Prague, he met with Václav Havel, now the President of Czechoslovakia. He also visited the Czech parliament and was named the Czech Cultural and Trade Representative to the United States. And Frank Zappa joins us this morning. Good morning.
FZ: Good morning.
Kathleen Sullivan: Twenty years ago, did you think that this would be your occupation?
FZ: No.
Kathleen Sullivan: What are the job specifications?
FZ: I'm supposed to represent them for trade, for tourism, and for cultural matters.
Kathleen Sullivan: Only rock business?
FZ: No, no, it's got nothing to do with rock & roll.
Kathleen Sullivan: So, is this Frank Zappa the businessman who's coming to the fore and not the rocker?
FZ: Well, let's say that Frank Zappa the rocker has been pretty much excluded from U.S. broadcasting. So Frank Zappa the rocker will now do something else.

David Dondorf: It turns out that, uh, when he had testified before Congress, uh, our fine Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, his wife had been involved in the, uh, little Washington clubs going to save the world.

David Dondorf: And James Baker went to Czechoslovakia, and he had told the Czech government that if they wanted anything to do with the United States government anymore, if they wanted aid or help or anything that they would have to get rid of this association with Frank Zappa.

Susan Baker (1985): Our primary purpose is to educate and inform parents about this alarming trend, as well as to ask the industry to exercise self-restraint. Some say there's no cause for concern. We believe there is.

FZ (1990): Thank you.

Mike Keneally: When we were on the road in '88, he was already feeling poorly. But, you know, he had been told it was various other conditions, various and he was, he was trying different ways to deal with it. But, you know, he was getting sicker all the time.

Mike Keneally: He retired from the concert stage at the same time that his illnes was coming on. We sat in the, in the control room, and he, he said, uh, "Well, like, you know, I've got some news for you." And I said, "What?" And he said, "I've just been diagnosed with prostate cancer." And he sat back and took a huge drag off his cigarette and looked resolute and, you know, and somewhat, you know, like, you know, "Fuck that." You know, like, like it's, uh, you know, "I've just been diagnosed with prostate cancer." He knew the— what the effect of those words were going to be, but he also gave off this attitude of "It's not gonna stop me from doing what I have to do."

FZ (1991): And politically, I am in the process of, uh, doing what we call a feasibility study to see, uh, if it's possible for me to run for President of the United States against George Bush.
Interviewer: That's quite a comment. You feel there's a chance?
FZ: Uh, yes. Not a good one, because, you know, he has more balloons than I do.
Interviewer: Hah, hah. Makes a lot of sense. The next time I interview you, I may be calling you Mr. President instead of Mr. Zappa.
FZ: Maybe.

Moon Unit Zappa (1991): Do any of these things work? Uh, we're here to make a statement on behalf of our family. Although Frank was looking forward to being here and really intended to be here, unfortunately, he's not here. As many of you know, he's been disgnosed by journalists as having cancer. We'd like you to know his doctors have diagnosed prostate cancer, which he's been fighting successfully, and he has been feeling well and working too hard and planned to attend . . .

FZ (1993): Let's do it. Tell her to hurry. Yeah, she's got to cover up the results of my botched transfusion here.
Interviewer: Ready?

Mike Keneally: He is diagnosed, and he really, uh, started working in earnest. And that in some ways, I think, was intentionally a summing up while he was ill in the last couple years.

Steve Vai: One of the things that Frank loved was musicians that really loved what they were doing, and enjoyed playing to the best of their ability and took great pride in the composer's music. There was not enough through the years. You know, Frank dealt with orchestras that were, you know, basically paid and came in, and did their job just by, "Okay, here's another chart." But then through the years, the— his music as it started touching more younger people who were growing up and taking up instruments, some of them had a deep desire to play Frank's music that way. So, when Frank discovered the Ensemble Modern, this is a group of musicians that wanted to play his music on a level that was yet to be achieved.

FZ (1991): When the final event is put together, I will make some structure out of what worked during the rehearsal. At the end of the day, you'll have it on paper, and you'll be able to read it. Okay? Okay, so watch, and I'll just move the pitch around the room.

FZ (1991): And instead of just playing your note, style the note. Put some sort of different vibrato rates on it, you know, your— that's the one note you have in life. You're really gonna play the shit out of it. Your big chance to be a star with one note. Here we go.

Gail Zappa: He worked lots of different projects simultaneously. But that shifted when it was becoming more obvious that he wasn't gonna have the time that he needed. And then I think he set up priorities himself.

FZ (1991): Went too fast. Da-da, da-da. There's nothing weird about the tempo relations. There's nothing science fiction about this tempo. Yeah.

Gail Zappa: You make decisions about what you can finish, what's really important to finish, which, you know, is another kind of composition.

FZ (1991): I see what it is.

Ruth Underwood: I had written a letter that I had hand-delivered to the house when I really thought I was not going to see him again. It was essentially a letter of love and gratitude for everything he had done in the world. And not just the world of music, and not just my little life, but the world. And so I asked him to read it after I would leave. Of course, he opened it right while I was there. He read it, and he said, um—he was not effusive. I didn't expect him to be, but he said, "That is really, really nice." And he hugged me. And he looked like he was in so much pain, and he hugged me.

Steve Vai: But nothing. It fucking sucked.

Gail Zappa: Before Frank died, he said, "Sell everything, get out of this business. It's hateful, and take, you know, go get a house at the beach, and have a good time." So, there you have it in a nutshell.

FZ: We were loud. We were coarse. And we were strange. And if anybody in the audience ever gave us any trouble, we'd tell them to fuck off.