In life, Frank Zappa built a legacy for his musical experimentation and boundless
creativity. However, his vision for how his art would outlive him has been heavily disputed.
There are two different points of view when it comes to Gail Zappa:
Critics say she made it all but impossible to share Frank Zappa's music with anyone,
while supporters say she's just looking out for his memory and his legacy as an
artist. She spoke with the Los Angeles Times and explained how she saw things, saying,
"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."
Between Frank's 1993 death and Gail's passing in 2015, she was nothing short of fanatical when it
came to issuing lawsuits to everyone from cover bands to festivals. She even sued record labels
to get complete control over his work. Was that what he wanted? It turns out that it wasn't.
After his death, she said he'd instructed her to sell all the masters he still had
and retire from the music business once and for all. However, Gail pointed out there was
a loophole to this request: he hadn't said anything about the rights to his music,
so she decided to go against his final wishes. Instead, she established the Zappa Family Trust,
and made sure everyone was doing Zappa the way that she thought he'd want.
With the ever-vigilant Gail Zappa ready to sue anyone and everyone who she thought was improperly
using Zappa family property, preserving Frank Zappa's legacy through live performance was no
easy task. Gail explained to NPR that she had no preference as to who plays Frank's music,
but she was very adamant that they secure the proper license to perform it.
At the top of the lawsuit hit list were cover bands, particularly those accused
of not playing Zappa's music precisely the way he had written it. Those performances,
his widow argued, weren't his music at all, but instead a quote, "wretched version of it."
However, according to Zappa's friend and band member Ike Willis,
that's not how Frank viewed it. Willis — who regularly played with the cover
band Project/Object — says that he spoke with Zappa just before his death, and the songwriter
expressed a radically different view regarding his last wishes for his music. Willis told NPR,
"He said, 'I would really like it if you could be one of the people that could actually keep
my music played, in some way, shape or form.' Those were his words. He didn't want it to die."
As to how people planned on honoring that request, well, there were a few options.
Many Frank Zappa fans know that the guitarist saved a lot of stuff. But it was only after
his death that archivists realized that Frank's preservational tendencies went
extremely deep — even extending to home movies he shot as a kid.
In 2020, UDiscoverMusic spoke with Joe Travers, the archivist in charge of
cataloging and preserving what was there. It was a huge undertaking. As Travers recalled,
they did not have the technology to playback all the recorded footage they found,
so they had no idea what they were looking at most of the time.
Unsurprisingly, researchers had to rely on Gail to provide the resources they needed to
take a look at the tapes they found. One of the most surprising things found in the vault were
recordings of a 20-piece and 10-piece electric orchestra that toured with Zappa only briefly
before being disbanded. No one knew he'd even kept recordings from that era of his career.
"The next thing that I'm gonna do is go out to
uh, Cal Arts tonight and hear a couple piano plays give a performance."
When Alex Winter waded into the vault to work on putting together his documentary Zappa,
he discovered something fascinating,
too. He was working on the preservation of some of the materials when he came across
what he thought were duplicates. They weren't. As he explained to AllMusic,
"He'd take a piece of super-8 film, dupe it, and then he'd re-cut it and draw on
it and put that to music and dump it on video. So, the vault was itself a
giant artistic archival project of his that he never stopped tinkering with."
The wild creativity of Frank Zappa and the no-holds-barred attitude
of the 1970s-era Saturday Night Live might seem like a match made in heaven,
but his appearance on the show was so bad that he was famously banned from returning.
One of the most memorable sketches he did on the show was one in which Zappa
groupies were amazed when he declined the illicit substances they offered him.
"Frank Zappa doesn't do drugs? I don't believe it!"
The whole thing is played as a joke, but as Alex Winter's 2020 documentary Zappa revealed, the
unlikely sounding story is absolutely true. Not only that, but Zappa didn't want those he worked
with to do drugs either, and suggesting otherwise was likely to be taken as a bit of an insult.
Speaking with UDiscoverMusic, Winter theorized that the reason for his
abstinence from drug use was that Zappa knew how hard his music was
to play, and simply wanted everyone clear-headed enough to get it right.
To say that Frank Zappa had a reputation for being a bit prickly is perhaps the
understatement of the year. However, when Alex Winter spoke with AllMusic about the
things that he learned from sifting through the tons of material Zappa left behind, he said that
one of often-overlooked detail about the artist was how collaborative and easy to talk to he was.
Winter observed that Zappa often treated musicians as though they were instruments themselves,
providing heavily specified instructions to get them to produce precisely what he had in
mind. However, Winter assured interviewers that despite Zappa's creative control,
players were still able to put their own personalities into his music.
Winter also observed that a lot of the more candid footage Zappa left
behind allowed a view into what he was like without his public persona. Winter explained,
"His attitude offstage was often incredibly chill and warm. It may be direct, it may be strict,
but in almost all the archival, he [did] come off much warmer than I expected."
Part of Frank Zappa's too-cool aura was a disdain for music that wasn't his own. In
interviews with The San Diego Union-Tribune, he condemned everything from the way people
listened to music to what was on the radio when he went to the dentist.
There were some genres he approved of — like jazz — but when Alex Winter did a deep-dive
into Zappa's work, he tried to learn whether Zappa saw commercial success as something to
be feared or a sign that his music wasn't up to the technical standards he sought out. Winter told
AllMusic that he walked away from the project with an interesting take on things, saying,
"[H]e wasn't afraid of success, and he wasn't afraid of commercial success,
but something in him, I think, was inherently suspicious of his own
desire to be writing music for commerce as opposed to what he thought was good art."
"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."
In other words, Zappa's main concern wasn't so much what the music meant to everyone else,
but what it meant to him. Above all else, he wanted to maintain creative authenticity.
In 2008, the Open Fist Theatre Company staged a production of Joe's Garage. It was based on
the Frank Zappa album originally released in 1979 which is rife with musical and lyrical
complexity that confronts everything from religion to the life of a musician.
The album was split into acts and billed as a rock opera. In fact,
according to Gail Zappa, Frank had always intended on turning it into a stage production,
but it was too big and expensive to even think about staging.
So, decades after it was originally written, Joe's Garage was finally performed on stage.
The show's producer, Michael Franco, told the Los Angeles Times that they found the
play's subject matter eerily relevant for the time, saying,
"The idea of government eavesdropping and mandating the behavior of its citizenry?
Really, really in play. I think he feared that America would turn into a fascistic theocracy,
and, lo and behold, we're awfully close."
Open Fist's Pat Towne also confirmed that no part of it was easy. The play had no score,
and someone had to transcribe all the music from the album. After all,
this is Frank Zappa we're talking about, the production had to be perfect or not happen at all.