For Gail Zappa, that means making sure that her late husband
'has the last word in terms of anybody's idea of who he is. And his
actual last word is his music.'

By Lynell George, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 21, 2008

WHOEVER devised the slipknot contract clause "into perpetuity" hadn't
conceived a Gail Zappa. She's made it her job to parse the music
industry's dense legalese, close contractual loopholes and, most
significantly, end what she sees as its iron grip on an artist's past,
present and future.

"Let me say it in the simplest way," she lays it out, her full hand on
the table, "My job is to make sure that Frank Zappa has the last word in
terms of anybody's idea of who he is. And his actual last word is his
music."

To that end, Gail Zappa has become a vocal advocate for artists'
rights. The wife of the late musician-composer Frank Zappa, she has been
keeping watch over not just her husband's image and brand but his
legacy. Despite what people might think, her dogged efforts are not
about erecting razor-wire around all things Zappa but protecting his
memory.

Yes, she knows all about the finger-pointing and the grousing, the
battles with the record labels about who owns what; the fury and
frustration of fans who are unable to download the most famous and
seminal works of the Zappa canon. The Zappa Family Trust is in the
middle of a dust-up with Rykodisc; Gail Zappa is suing Rykodisc over
"copyright infringements including digital rights."

It's not the first time the Zappas have been in a legal dance: In 1977,
Frank Zappa filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. Records and his former
manager citing artistic grievances and questioning certain "creative
accounting practices," Gail says. After an out-of-court settlement was
reached in 1982, the rights to his master recordings reverted to him, a
lucrative boon.

December marks the 15th anniversary of Frank Zappa's passing, but
interest in him and the work continues only to grow. "No two of Frank's
shows were ever the same, which is one of the reasons he was one of the
most heavily bootlegged artists," Gail explains.

Tapping into that interest, in the last few years, the Zappa Family
Trust has begun to release rarities from the Zappa vault. Frank was an
obsessive chronicler, recording both audio and video (in every
conceivable format) of his process. Gail has established two labels --
reconstituting Zappa and launching Vaulternative -- to showcase that
material, which includes band rehearsals from the '60s and live footage
selected by Gail with the assist of Vaultmeister Joe Travers. This
summer, they've issued on DVD the concert film "The Torture Never Stops"
in Frank Zappa's original edit and "One Shot Deal," a previously
unreleased compilation of guitar-focused music. Reissues of Zappa's
first solo album, 1967's "Lumpy Gravy," and the following year's "We're
Only In It for the Money" are in the offing. Coinciding with all of this
is the very first staging of his 1979 rock opera, "Joe's Garage," at
Hollywood's that, loosely speaking, chronicles the travails of an
imaginary guitarist named Joe. Gail gave the first-time greenlight.

"I'm the front-of-house mixer," Gail Zappa says, settling into a soft
chair near Travers, just to the right of an old console setup in what
was most recently Frank's editing room in their Laurel Canyon home. Gail
usually makes herself available only for the nuts-and-bolts sound bite
related to a release, "but it's not often that I can get into the
grommets and widgets and explain what's behind all of this."

Her position hasn't always made her popular -- she's butted heads at
times with everyone from record execs and label lawyers to fan boards
and tribute bands. "I can't go out and be the rebuttal witness every
minute because I just end up looking like the screaming shrew that I'm
getting the reputation for being."

But she has her reasons, and they're rooted in a promise: "My job is to
make sure that everything is as clean as you can get it. . . . I don't
want anybody standing between the audience and what Frank's intention as
a composer was and still is. [W]hat I've discovered in the process . . .
comes down to one simple thing. Because everybody wants to remake his
image. And they can . . . Well, they can all pound salt!"

Fifteen years gone, and Frank Zappa still casts a long shadow. Gail,
like Travers, often speaks of him in present tense. And though, on this
late-summer afternoon, no one occupies Frank's old console chair, there
are all sorts of winking reminders salted about everywhere. Gold records
and old album covers. A "Nixon for Governor" poster hangs on a far door.
Scores of "Zappa" license plates, gifts from fans from across the
country, frame the old console, and photographs, tucked into unexpected
places, have a fun-house effect: the eyes seem to follow you. It's not a
spirit that hovers but an ethos; standards to be upheld. Gail Zappa is
not custodian of a ghost but of a force that still has power to prod and
provoke.

Keeping watch keeps her busy. There are the cover bands to police, and
there is even the historical narrative of Frank's band The Mothers to
keep close tabs on. It can be all over the map -- tribute bands
asserting that they are "embodying the spirit of Frank Zappa," an old
band member claiming collaborator status. "Do you remember 'Police
Woman'? Pepper?" Gail Zappa asks. "That's me. The ultimate Sgt. Pepper."

One of the front-burner issues has been the digital music rights for
the work that makes up Frank Zappa's primary catalog. Many recording
artists have expressed their distaste for digital sound, arguing that
when their work is compressed into MP3 files, it can seem flat and thin.
What the public might not know, Gail says, "is that it was Frank's
concept to limit [the sale] to a format so that it was accurately
represented, that being 16-bit technology -- CDs. He didn't want it
compressed. So we're currently in a lawsuit over this issue."

What's at stake here is intent: "iTunes has been from the get-go
massively compressed. That's fine perhaps if you're Britney Spears . . .
but it's not fine for Frank Zappa's music, and he was interested in
protecting that." A spokesperson for Rykodisc parent Warner Music had no
comment.

Peering into genius

TO LABEL Frank Zappa an iconoclast would only be rounding the corner of
the neighborhood where he and his imagination reside. There's so much
stirring at every turn and busy intersection: glances of doo-wop, blues,
faux-psychedelia. His music couldn't be fenced-in in terms of genre. In
fact, much of it is an amalgam of styles -- embracing, say, heavy
artillery guitar-rock with nods to composers Igor Stravinsky or Edgard
Varèse -- that reflected his citizen-of-the world sensibilities.

Angular and antic, prescient and political and vamped-up in tricky time
signatures, Zappa was of his time -- as a commentator and a critic --
and light years ahead of it. "Frank often said," Gail says, "that his
job was to go 'out there' and come back . . . and tell you what I found
out.'"

Part of the idea behind opening the vaults was to chart those travels
and to give audiences an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at the
composer's process. As Vaultmeister, Travers isn't just cataloging the
contents, but, he says "also investigating the possibilities." Since
1995, Travers, the drummer for a band led by Frank's son Dweezil, Zappa
Plays Zappa, has been sifting through the assets; a wall-to-wall,
floor-to-ceiling audio/video and all-manner of miscellany magic
library.

Though every silver film canister, tape box or VHS shell is marked in
Frank Zappa's own hand, "it doesn't mean that you'll find what you think
in there," says Travers, so there is a fair amount of mind-reading and
extrapolating. There is basically every kind of format that music was
archived on from the '50s to the '70s, and Travers has about 40% of it
cataloged both on hard drive and CD.

Travers works closely with Gail, submitting ideas for releases.
Ultimately, she has the final word. "I kind of look at the progression
of the releases, like if we've released a record from a band in 1976, I
don't want to stay in that realm. I want to jump around and try to cover
different areas. . . . I try to prioritize a lot of things that Frank
didn't," Travers says. "There is an album. . . called 'Wazzoo,' which is
a 20-piece band that Frank only did eight shows with but never released
anything from. But we just did."

The Zappa label is dedicated to work wholly produced by Frank Zappa,
while Vaulternative highlights old sessions, rehearsals, sonic threads
long stored away. The Zappa Family Trust has about 40 projects in the
works, Gail says.

"We could easily put out five to eight projects a year and can do that
for the next few years." That would make Zappa almost as prolific as he
was when he was living.

"Years ago my husband said, 'Sell everything and get out of this
horrible business.' Did I listen? No. I tried. I really tried. But I
realized early on that I have to defend his right to have been here in
the first place," Gail says.

So all of this, every choice, weighs heavy. "The best thing that I can
hope is to . . . keep windows open to be able to discover the music. If
[people] get to the original recordings, and even Zappa Plays Zappa and
other groups that respect the intent of the composer then that music is
going to be with them for the rest of their lives.

"It is not a causal relationship," she says. "So that's the reason, the
whole motivation for what I do what I do. Because I owe it to Frank and
what I feel about his music. When it's said and done, I still work for
that guy."

http://www.latimes.com/en...62478story


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Pat Towne stages Frank Zappa's 'Joe's Garage'
By Lynell George, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 21, 2008


BACK IN the '70s, Pat Towne was one of those boys who was out there
listening -- listening for something out of the ordinary, something with
substance. "I was the kind of kid who didn't dance in lock step to the
disco beat, because it looked like everybody was marching in step and
becoming mindless," Towne says.

As a prog-rock guy into Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, Towne was
fascinated by Frank Zappa's abstract expressionist musical canvas. But
there was something else, an anti-conformist message, that he found
intriguing: "His music attacked those kinds of people and that kind of
thinking. It instantly appealed to me. As well as it being great music."


He'd first connected with Zappa's 1973 album "Over-Nite Sensation" in
high school, but when a friend visited his dorm room with a copy of
"Joe's Garage" a few years later, Towne was hooked. It was a concept
album that took on sweeping themes -- religion, overzealous government,
sex, consumer culture and was "full of all these funny snippets and side
remarks. When I saw that the album said 'Act I,' that stayed with me. I
had images in my head of what scenes would look like. It existed in my
head as a pipe dream."

Towne finally is getting a chance to bring that dream to life on stage.
This week, the Open Fist Theatre will present the world premiere of
"Joe's Garage," Zappa's three-act rock opera, adapted by Towne (who is
directing) and the show's producer, Michael Franco. It's been an
obstacle course of sorts to say the least -- from gaining Gail Zappa's
consent ("I did a PowerPoint presentation and acted out scenes in front
of her!") -- to evoking just the right mood. "I told the design team,
'This is the palette, the album cover. Let this stimulate your
conversation.' "

Chance put Towne in contact with the Zappas' daughter, Moon (the voice
of "Valley Girl"), in 2005. She played a part in a play that Towne had
directed, and he worked up the nerve to ask her about approaching her
mother to stage the piece.

"Gail said he'd actually meant to have it performed," Towne says, but
money and time were issues. "He could make a . . . lot more money doing
rock 'n' roll."

For a piece conceived nearly 30 years ago, it retains a topical
immediacy and shock value, producer Franco says. And what did Zappa see?
"Through satire [he] showed people what they really were: You know
people right now who are making love to machines, Internet porn? We know
people like this. That's something that Frank Zappa wrote about in 1979.


"The idea of government eavesdropping and mandating the behavior of its
citizenry? Really, really in play," he says. "I think he feared
that America would turn into a fascistic theocracy, and, lo and behold,
we're awfully close."

While a couple of actors begged off early, saying that some of the
content went "against their religious beliefs," casting wasn't the
biggest hurdle. Getting the music down has been the top priority.

"There was no score," Towne says. "We had to hire someone to listen to
the album and transcribe the whole thing, first for voice and piano so
the actors could rehearse."

Now they are fine-tuning the seven-piece band and are considering
adding a horn section. There are other splashes of verisimilitude:
Franco has secured Carvin amps, the brand Zappa used, and, at press
time, he was still trying to find a Stratocaster with a whammy bar. And
still, there is Gail, and her ultimate approval.

"We're trying to be as authentically Frank as possible," Towne says.
"But it's complicated music with weird rhythms and odd harmonies. But it
has to be absolutely right because it's about the music. Even though I
keep telling everyone that it's the show of 'Joe's Garage,' we'll get a
lot of feedback: I know we'll have the Frankophiles."

http://www.latimes.com/en...5989.story

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tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Thanks for posting the article.

i understand Gail's intent, but she's keeping a lot of musicians out of work. i don't know what the big deal is over cover bands and would Frank really care? He'd probably think they were pathetic, but..

i heard she's even bumped heads with Ike Willis because he was doing the cover thing. coldblooded! yeah, it's Zappa's work, but he was the medium and voice for a lot of it. Some folks still want to hear Ike doing Zappa tunes, what's the big deal?

Anyways, this caught my attention.



i don't know if it's a take on the Grand Wazoo, if so, i gotta hear!