What: Zappa Plays Zappa
When: Monday, Jan. 5 7:30 p.m. (doors at 6:30)
Where: McPherson Playhouse
Tickets: $74/$99 in advance at McPherson Playhouse and the Royal Theatre Box Office, by phone at 250-386-6121 or online at www.rmts.bc.ca
Dweezil Zappa is running on three hours sleep. His schedule demands long days and late nights, and his two young daughters are both are under the weather.
That's a bad conflict of schedules for the bandleader and artistic director of Zappa Plays Zappa, an immensely challenging project that brings the music of his father, the late and adored Frank Zappa, into new light.
"You're required to be at the top of your game to play this music," Zappa, 39, said tiredly from his home in Los Angeles. "You can't fake your way through it."
The project, which began two years ago with contributions from some of Frank Zappa's former bandmates, Terry Bozzio and Steve Vai, among others, has since become solely Dweezil's. He charts the music, handles the arrangements and tackles the bulk of the very challenging guitar solos, the majority of which were written by his father two or three decades ago.
For the purpose of Zappa Plays Zappa, Dweezil worked out the arrangements for 70 songs from Frank's vast catalogue of nearly 80 releases. Only his father's music would qualify, Dweezil decreed, despite the fact a good number of these songs were never meant to be played on guitar.
"I had to completely change my entire technique, and that's like the equivalent of re-learning how to walk. I literally have to practise three or four hours a day before the show, and then play a three-hour show. It's really tough. One of the songs we play is Billy the Mountain, and that's a half-hour from top to bottom with over 3,000 words of dialogue in it."
The current tour is being staged by the Zappa Family Trust, of which Dweezil and his three siblings are all members. His mother, Gail, manages her late husband's catalogue of tapes, the entirety of which is stored in the temperature-controlled basement of the Zappa family's Los Angeles home.
Dweezil has access to everything, but that didn't make things any easier, given that his father was a radical composer and complicated genius. "Frank used a rock band as his orchestra."
As such, there is not a lot of room for interpretation for Dweezil and bandmates Aaron Arntz (keyboards, trumpet), Scheila Gonzalez (saxophone, flute), Pete Griffin (bass), Billy Hulting (marimba, percussion), Jamie Kime (guitar) and Joe Travers (drums).
"He would write the music out, and it is written to be played in a very specific way," Dweezil said of his father, who died in 1993 at the age of 52. "Every recording that he has released is how he wants his music to be played and heard. When we learned the songs, we learned the exact version that is on a particular record. We don't change anything."
Dweezil, by his own admission, is no less a boss than his father. The level of quality control has to be high, he said, much higher than that of anyone else attempting to play Zappa material. It has been an arduous journey full of revelations and emotional despair. Nothing came easy for Dweezil.
"Mentally, it took a lot of preparation. Before I even put the band together, I studied the music for two years and transformed my technique -- and that was just to see if it was possible. I didn't want to do anything half-assed. I wanted to go up there and make it really special and something that would stand on its own and do the music justice."
Auditions for Zappa Plays Zappa set the tone for the project. Dweezil was looking for young musicians, not former members of his dad's previous bands. Dweezil was surprised to find that fewer than two dozen players were applying for six positions. Many potential applicants, fearing the complexity of Frank's music, were too scared to apply, Dweezil was told.
The keyboard auditions were incredibly hard. Dweezil needed someone with "good ears," so no transcriptions were provided. "They had to listen to and transcribe Inca Roads and The Black Page and come in and play it only with the drummer. Those are two of the hardest songs Frank ever wrote and they only had two days to learn it. Typically, even if you're a great musician who has the ability to memorize, you need two weeks to get that stuff together, and for a lot of people it might take two months or two years."
Dweezil has carved a niche for himself outside of his father's legacy. He was a VJ during the early days of MTV, appeared alongside former girlfriend Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, and voiced the character of Ajax Duckman in the animated TV series Duckman. Dweezil also had a band in the mid-1990s, Z, which featured his brother, Ahmet, on lead vocals.
While he still maintains a solo career, Dweezil's main focus for the past 10 years has been Zappa Plays Zappa. In terms of complexity and scope, nothing compares to it, Dweezil said.
"The whole point of doing this was to introduce my dad's music to a new generation of fans. The younger generation doesn't know all that much about the music, other than stealing it off the Internet. It's nice to give them an introduction to it in the live situation, because that's where it becomes the most inspirational.
"In this day and age when people are so used to people going on stage and lip-synching and faking everything, this gives them a shot in the arm."
