Pulling off a Frank Zappa tribute band would be daunting enough for any musician, and even more so when he's the son of the great man. Kevin Courtney meets Dweezil Zappa, who has set the bar high for himself as the mother of reinvention.
'SO, SON, when are you gonna cover one of my songs?" When rock stars' kids start their own musical careers, the last thing they want to do is play any song written by their famous forebear. It wouldn't be wise for Julian Lennon to release his own version of Imagine, and it wouldn't be very honest of Rufus Wainwright to sing Rufus Is a Tit Man. And it would be completely tasteless of young Gervaise Glitter to resurrect Do You Wanna Be in My Gang? for his school concert.
Most musical offspring want to forge their own artistic identity and keep well out of their legendary parent's shadow, even if it means avoiding the easy way to an audience's heart. Besides, you don't want to constantly remind people who the real talent in the family is.
Of course, some brave souls have done an entire album of their parents' tunes, and when Natalie Cole recorded Unforgettable, her tribute to papa Nat King Cole, she got her dad's ghostly voice to join in from beyond the grave. Kelly Osbourne did the same with her dad on a version of Black Sabbath's Changes, but, though Ozzy was most emphatically alive, it was still a bit eerie.
Dweezil Zappa is attempting nothing so macabre, although he's still embarking on a very scary escapade indeed. The son of musical polymath Frank Zappa is going to perform an entire concert of his dad's material, live, onstage and without a safety net. That, as any true muso will tell you, is tantamount to a suicide mission.
It's not like Jakob Dylan deciding to strum a few of his dad's songs - Blowin' in the Wind is hardly likely to challenge anyone's capabilities. We're talking about some of the most complex, convoluted, difficult, awkward stuff ever to have been filed under the loose category of "pop".
As the leader of 1960s freakshow The Mothers of Invention, and then as the ringmaster of a travelling rock'n'roll circus that featured a troupe of top musicians playing a menagerie of musical styles, Zappa was a force to be reckoned with. He was a ridiculously accomplished musician and arranger who could do things with an electric guitar that would turn many axe heroes pale with fear.
Zappa didn't just do rock music; he did rock, jazz, jazz-rock, funk, r'n'b, classical, prog, avant garde, musique concrète, ambient and any other genre you care to throw in, blending them all together with consummate skill and dazzling flair. Not only was Zappa's music dead complicated, it was witty, smart, scatological, satirical and wildly entertaining. Beneath the base lyrics of Titties & Beer and Don't Eat the Yellow Snow lay a rich tapestry of contemporary styles, which Zappa wove together with deceptive ease.
He was the Stravinsky of modern rock, and also the most prolific artist of the day, releasing more than 60 albums of wildly diverse music before his death from prostate cancer in 1993. Anyone who dares attempt to recreate Zappa's sound must be either completely crazy or totally confident - or both.
By my reckoning, it would take the average musician 20 years to learn even a handful of Zappa songs and be able to play them without fluffing a note or missing a cue. So, Dweezil, what have you been up to for the past couple of decades?
"I haven't been working on it for 20 years, but it would have been a good idea to actually start back then," says Zappa. "There's a lot of material that we're working on for the tour that's very challenging. I have deliberately chosen some of my favourite instrumentals and songs that have instrumental interludes that I think are unique to Frank's writing style. So a lot of those things do require a lot of attention to detail, and time to not only learn how to play but also to memorise."
Dweezil is no slouch on the guitar, as proven by his most recent album, Automatic, but he's smart enough not to attempt this gargantuan task alone. He's gathered some pretty good musicians together, including guys who used to play in Frank's band, such as vocalist Napoleon Murphy Brock and guitarist Steve Vai.
The idea is to take Zappa's tunes out on the road (it's nicknamed the "Tour de Frank") and play them for a whole new audience who never experienced the original Zappa, and hopefully turn on a new generation to the twisted treasures contained such albums as Hot Rats, One Size Fits All, We're Only in It for the Money, Apostrophe, Sheik Yerbouti and Joe's Garage. It's a safe bet, though, that the shows will attract longtime Zappa fans eager to hear their hero's music brought back to life onstage.
This isn't the first time Dweezil has done his dad's music. He released a version of the classic My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama in the 1980s, which made him a darling of a nascent MTV generation that liked people with weird names, weird hair and unconventional parentage. His sister Moon Unit also became a celebrity (with a name like that, she couldn't fail to get attention), and famously guested on her dad's song, Valley Girl, introducing the world to such San Fernando Valley terms as "grody", "like wow" and "gag me with a spoon".
Dweezil, meanwhile, carved out his own career, but couldn't rise above the towering legacy of his dad. Well, who could? Along the way, he hosted numerous MTV specials, acted in films such as Pretty in Pink and did a cover of The Surfaris' Wipe Out with Herbie Hancock. He also became romantically involved with US singer Lisa Loeb, collaborating with her on many writing and recording projects. But always, at the back of his mind, was a niggling desire to tackle his dad's daunting repertoire and fulfil some guitaristic ambitions of his own.
"It's been something I considered doing, but I had to take some time to discover what it is I ultimately wanted to do, and that was not just to put a band together that was just filled with former members of Frank's band and have me just in the back noodling around on some stuff. I wanted to spend the time to really get to know that music and understand it from a greater perspective, and that required me to do a lot of study and training for about two years."
His relationship with Loeb ended in 2004, leaving Dweezil with lots of time to get to grips with the sheer volume and dizzyingly high standard of his dad's music. Zappa was a notoriously finicky bandleader, demanding virtuoso performances from his ever-flowing roster of musicians, many of them pulled from the ranks of jazz. Before each tour, Zappa would rehearse his band rigorously for three months until they were so tight you couldn't tell whether it was live or whether it was Memorex.
Dweezil has had less time to knock his band of veterans into shape, but he reckons he'll still be able to do justice to his dad's oeuvre.
"For me it's really important that we reach younger audiences, because there's nothing like Frank's music. It's always been ahead of its time, and its still very contemporary. For younger bands that are just starting and are inspired by modern punk and that kind of stuff, there's really not a lot of fantastic musicianship in popular music. And that's a shame, because one of the things I've always enjoyed about music is listening to people who are really good at what they do, not only on a technical level but also on a musical level, where they have interesting ideas.
"I grew up listening to Frank's music and I've always looked for that in other music, but it doesn't seem to be there now. So if younger kids could be exposed to Frank's music they might have a different sense of what is possible."
Zappa Plays Zappa at Vicar St, Dublin on Sunday
