Dweezil Zappa brings ‘50 Years of Frank’ to Durango

By Katie Chicklinski-Cahill Staff reporter

Sunday, Aug 6, 2017 5:00 AM

Dweezil Zappa will bring his “50 Years of Frank” show to the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College next week.

Courtesy of Dweezil Zappa

In the pantheon of rock idols, there’s no one quite like Frank Zappa: His compositions were complex, his social commentary and sense of humor spot-on.

Zappa’s musical legacy is being carried on by Frank’s son, Dweezil – a successful musician in his own right – who’s been touring his “50 Years of Frank” show that is headed Thursday night to the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College.

Q: What kind of show are you guys planning on giving us here?

A: Well, only the best (laughs). Our tour changes every time we have a new leg of the tour added; we’ll always add some new material here or there. But the core theme of this show is celebrating my dad’s first album, “Freak Out!” so the tour is called “50 Years of Frank.” What we do is the first, probably 40 minutes of the show, is early Mothers of Invention-era material, so we play a bunch of stuff from “Freak Out!” and then we kind of jump on to some of the other records. But then it kind of has a chronological feel for the whole night, so we’ll go from the beginning of his career, then on into the early ’70s, middle ’70s, and then kind of jump around a bit there because we can get into some stuff from the ’80s and then – you end up getting music of all different variety in there because we play some of his classical music, we play rock music, the sort of avant-garde stuff – there’s a little bit of everything. That’s always the challenge, is to balance it in a way that people get a chance to hear things they may expect and then things that are much deeper album cuts and things that they might not expect to hear.

Q: Who’s in your band now?

A: The band is made up of all musicians that I’ve found over the years. We don’t have any alumni in the band, so it’s younger musicians.

Part of the reason to do that is that I want people to be able to understand that this music is timeless, and it should be carried forward and you need to have an example of younger people playing the music for it to keep going. It’s generally more thought of as nostalgia music if you have a bunch of people that are over 70 on stage, you know, so it’s a goal of mine for younger generations to discover the music and be inspired by it to understand that there should be no boundaries in music, and you should take it to the Nth degree for creativity.

Q: Where do you think music is headed now?

A: I don’t know: It’s very cyclical; it’s always been. Every generation will say, “Oh, my parents hated the music I listened to, and I hated the music they listened to,” and all that kind of stuff.

That, for me, didn’t necessarily happen: I loved my dad’s music and the stuff he listened to, and I found things I showed him that he ended up liking as well, so that was not my experience like the stereotype that you typically hear about.

I have my own experience with the generational gap with the stuff that my kids listen to. They’re used to pop radio, and there’s some terrible rap music and stuff that they get in there. I have a low tolerance for the low creativity in some of that stuff. It’s not that it’s a brand of music I dislike; it’s the lack of creativity that is propelling some of that stuff. There are some people that do things really well and do cool stuff, but that’s not necessarily the stuff that gets on the radio.

Q: Do you have any songs that are favorites from your dad?

A: There are definitely favorites of mine and then there are also fan favorites that sort of make their way through most shows, but the song “Inca Roads” is one of my favorites to play – also happens to be one of the hardest songs in my dad’s catalog – it’s a great example of something that occurs in his music, especially when you put it in a live context, and that is the song is composed and arranged so that when you play it live, it automatically has to be different every time you play it because there’s improvisational parts that are structured to be different.

He made a tune once called “Approximate,” and what it did, it gave you a contour – you have a starting note and an ending note, but everything else in between that was a made-up pitch by the musician at that time. So you could all play in unison as far as the rhythm goes, but you’re all playing different notes, so it makes it just a sound contour. Every time you play it, it’s different, but everybody knows when to start and when to stop.

There are elements like that that are in this song, and then there are very structured parts as well. The parts that are structured will remain the same, but the improvisational stuff will be different every time.

If you saw my dad on tour and he played that song in every show, you’d never hear the same version of that song, and that’s by design. So that stuff’s pretty cool, that it’s built into his compositions.

Q: Did you ever want to be anything else?

A: In the very beginning before I started playing guitar, like when I was about 8, I wanted to be a marine biologist because I was obsessed with watching Jacques Cousteau on PBS, but then I saw the movie “Jaws,” and that ruined everything.

Q: So that killed it for you?

A: Yep. And then I was into baseball after that, and after hearing Randy Rhodes play with Ozzy Osbourne, and hearing Van Halen, I was thinking, “Wait a minute. I’ve got to start checking out the guitar.” That’s when the tables turned.

Q: Were you naturally pretty good at it?

A: I think once I decided that’s what I wanted to spend a lot of time doing, I was able to progress pretty quickly. I didn’t pick it up on the first day and say, “Oh, this is easy! I know how to do this!”

Q: Was your dad psyched when you picked it up?

A: I think he was curious to see if I would stick with it, and it became pretty obvious I was going to shortly thereafter. On my birth certificate, instead of religion, where you’re supposed to mark what religion you are, he put “musician.”

Q: What do you miss most about your dad?

A: Really just his humor and his social commentary. Obviously, his musical prowess is something that is important to me, too, but just him as a person – he was very, very intelligent and entertaining. In this day and age, it would be nice to have his perspective on politics and social commentary.

katie@durangoherald.com