Dweezil Zappa Returns to Northeast Florida to Celebrate Two Early-Seventies Landmark Frank Zappa Albums

More than 30 years have passed since Frank Zappa died. An absolute artistic iconoclast for any age, Zappa (December 21, 1940-December 4, 1993) used the milieu of the ‘60s counterculture as his springboard: an era that he helped create and then ultimately mocked and moved well beyond.

While Zappa was known by pop music audiences for satirical rock, Zappa was never a pop-music artist. He was, however, a prolific composer of postmodernist classical works, a mercurial guitarist, and in later years, an admirable social critic and activist for free speech. Operating outside of the music industry, Zappa self-produced his own music, recorded with optimum fidelity at his own studio (the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen) located in his home, and released much of his music on his own label. In his lifetime, Zappa released 62 albums; since 1994, the Zappa Family Trust has released 67 posthumous records. 

In recent years, Zappa’s family have been embroiled in a messy, sad fracas that is highly personal yet unfortunately has splayed out into the public arena. In 2022, Universal Music Group purchased Zappa’s music catalog, archives, and all that it contained, removing the Zappa heirs from any aspects of curatorial control.

Eldest son Dweezil Zappa has been consistent in carrying on his late father’s musical legacy, regardless of any inter-family dissonance, legal threats, or corporate acquisitions of his father’s music.

An impressive guitarist in his own right, Dweezil also inherited the paternal genetics of operating with a DIY sensibility. The Dweezil Zappa site features forums, podcasts and ongoing updates, while his YouTube channel offers both humorous and candid clips featuring Dweezil and his family. Dweezil also now owns and operates the state-of-the-art recording studio Hikari Studios, which utilizes Dolby Atmos technology to integrate analog and digital recording.   

Dweezil Zappa and his highly-adept band— Scheila Gonzalez (saxophone, flute, keyboards, harmonica, vocals); Kurt Morgan (bass, vocals); Zach Tabori (guitar, vocals); Bobby Victor (keyboards, vocals) and Ryan Brown (drums, percussion, vocals)—return to Northeast Florida on Friday, January 24 for a performance at The Florida Theatre. The Rox(Postroph)y Tour celebrates the 50^th anniversary of two crucial Frank Zappa albums: Apostrophe (‘) and Roxy & Elsewhere, back-to-back releases that codified Zappa and his band’s skills at blending no-holds-barred humor and equally high-caliber jazz soul-funk and fusion. 

The Jacksonville Music Experience recently spoke to Dweezil while the band were on the road, where he spoke about the blunt realities of touring in the 21^st century, finding supporting players who can play nice, and the unique, admirable qualities of diehard Zappa freaks.

How is your family? Is everyone’s families and homes alright? [Note: At press time, the fires in Los Angeles were raging].

Well, we’re doing all right. We’re in a relatively safe zone for the moment, but you just never know. It’s being handled so poorly by the state of California, with the people that were put into power during the last administration. It’s wild how incompetent everything has been.

I’m sorry to hear that. Not to come in right with a bummer but less than a month ago, you released a mini-documentary on your YouTube channel and you make a strong argument that touring in the 21^st century really is a bad idea. According to the documentary, the cost of touring actually doubled since 2020, when you had to cancel the Hot Rats tour during the pandemic.

It is a challenge because people don’t realize that the onus is on the artist to make the thing actually happen. People think that artists are just getting paid left and right to do this stuff and everything’s taken care of. But no: you gotta cover the costs of all the logistics, the hotels, the tour bus, paying the band and crew, etc. and if you’re not able to make it work, where the numbers work in your favor so that you can actually put money in your pocket at the end of the day, then there’s no reason to actually go out on the road. 

It seems like you have the actual process fairly streamlined. 

Well, a bus typically has 12 bunks, and we, for the most part, as band and crew, it’s 11 people. But then we have the addition of my step daughter who’s on the tour, helping do the VIP stuff for the audience. So it’s filled up. We have a bus and a trailer.

Did the fires in L.A. affect you getting on the road?

It was quite a challenge, because the fire started right at the very end of the rehearsal period. So we lost power and lost time in rehearsals. We already had a limited amount of rehearsals planned. We only had a week of rehearsals, but we kind of didn’t get the full week because of all the madness that took place. But today is a day off, so I’ll play catch up and learn some parts that I haven’t had time to work on, and we’ll try to get back up and running with more stuff to make sure that we play all the things we intended to play on this tour.

I have to give a shout-out to your band. I have seen you live in concert before and it’s pretty incredible and the band are fairly younger musicians playing your dad’s music, which can be incredibly complex and challenging. Do you kind of lurk around jazz colleges to find these players or were they Zappa fans who became musicians? 

From the beginning, I only wanted to ever find younger musicians that had the requisite skills to play the music. I didn’t want to focus on using alumni, because that, to me, is not the representation of the music in its entirety. I think a lot of fans kind of think, “Oh, well, the only people that can really play [Zappa music] are the people that formally played with Frank Zappa.” But I believe that’s not really true, so I set out to put bands together that had musicians that would want to be able to be part of the team in the same sense that an orchestra has to play music as groups of sections, you know, and they have to perform it and stick to the plan. And that’s what my dad always had problems with: that some people would get into the band and then try to draw attention to themselves, change parts and do things. And that’s when he would ask them, “Window or aisle. How would you like to return home?” Yet, for me, we did have some times where we did open auditions, and really almost nothing came from that. There were really not many good players that had the skills. Scheila was part of the first open audition thing that we had a while back but that was also still through some recommendations of some other people.

So you did actual open calls? 

Oh yeah. That first round, there was a guy that used to organize a lot of musicians in L.A. He’s since passed. Barry Squire was his name, and he had a big Rolodex of people that were good for certain types of music, and so Scheila was on that short list for that period of time, but I remember just, you know, briefly, to tell you I was expecting that we would have very limited amounts of people that would respond to the call for open auditions. 

Do you think because Zappa music is so intense to try and perform that people were just afraid to audition?

A bit of that, yeah. So Barry was like, “Oh no, you’ll see there’ll be 40-50 people that will want to play.” And I said, “I bet it’s going to be less than 20.” And I was right. It was 17 musicians. (Laughs). And of the 17, only three were worth looking into as musicians, to be in the band. So, a lot of times it did come down to other people having recommendations. And really, the most important part of having people in the band is not so much, “Can they play the music.” But rather, “Can you tolerate them on a tour bus?”

Your dad released something like 11 fairly different records between 1970-1974, culminating in the two albums you’re focusing on: Apostrophe (‘) and Roxy & Elsewhere. What are some of your favorite qualities or aspects of his music from that specific era?

There was a restlessness that was kind of happening then. That was the era where it was the coolest combination of funk meets fully-compositional qualities within the horn arrangements and the vibe of everything at that time was the instrumentation, that was focused largely on the groovy things that were popular at the time. So you would have these really cool things in film and television music and soundtracks that were brass arrangements. And my dad was doing a lot of that cool stuff in his own music, and then you had the clavinet and the emergence of synthesizers. So to me, that was a really exciting period, because he was creating an electronic orchestra so that his music could really go to new heights and go in new directions. Because he was always really writing music that would work for an actual orchestra. But the way that he used the rock band to play the stuff is, I think the key to that period of the middle 70s—that’s really my favorite era of my dad’s music.

I want to talk a bit about your role as an improviser on the guitar, in playing the music of Frank Zappa. When you’re playing his songs, do you adhere to his modes when you solo, in the sense that he soloed a lot in the Mixolydian mode, so do you stay within that lane when soloing?

I like to try to use actual phrases from the solos as guideposts, and then fill in the blanks with my own ideas. But I go to extreme lengths to recreate the sounds so that they’ll be evocative of the era. So if I’m playing “The Deathless Horsie” from Shut Up ‘n Play Your Guitar, I want to recreate that same guitar sound and play in that style. And on this tour, I’m actually playing some of my dad’s guitars that he physically played on stage. So I’m actually playing the Roxy [Gibson] SG and the Shut Up ‘n Play Your Guitar [Gibson] Les Paul.

Judging by your site and online presence, particularly with forums, it seems like you are a musician who engages in a kind of active conversation or communication with your fans. It’s refreshingly anti-celebrity.

Well, I feel like the best experiences I ever had when I got to meet people that I admired and liked what they did, the good, positive experiences were when they were really just down to earth and would have real conversations about things of interest and not have anything be about just bulls***, pomp and circumstance. That kind of thing never held any appeal my dad, he didn’t do any of this kind of stuff: he didn’t have VIP experiences or whatever, but he was generally pretty nice to all of the people that would encounter him, either backstage or somewhere else. Unless they came up with some sort of weird attitude, he would meet that, you know, in the same way that they were showing up. But I just feel like in in terms of choice for fans to spend their money on supporting a band and doing something, I would think of it as a refreshing option to be able to see a show, kind of the way that we’re putting it on, and have access to be able to have a proper Q&A and other things, because we know the people that really like this music, they like it in a way that is way different than just liking a current pop song. They’re lifers, and they want to have answers for certain things that have been on their mind for years, or they want to share a story about the time they saw the concert and it changed their life. And I feel like all of that is a way to keep the music moving forward and have people feel like they’re happy that they stuck around liking this music.

Zappa fans are definitely lifers. I don’t know many people that have a cursory interest in the music of Zappa. They go all in. It’s always a misfire to generalize but have you noticed qualities or shared traits of Zappa fans? 

We call them “lifers” out of affection, for sure. The thing that happens really with Zappa music, is that it will change people’s perspective on what’s possible in music and in the world. They do get a different viewpoint from the music on a couple of different levels. That’s not typical from standard rock and roll or pop music. So it’s a special type of individual that usually gravitates towards the music. And oddly enough, oftentimes, if you ask them what their profession is, most of the people that really love the music and get super into it are in very complex roles in their careers. Some of them could be surgeons, some of them are airline pilots, but they are people that have technical skills and high responsibility, and they just operate on multi-layered levels in their own work and life. So the music ends up being, you know, a perfect counterpart.

Dweezil Zappa’s Rox(Postroph)y Tour is featured at 8 p.m. Friday, January 24 at The Florida Theatre. Regular seating and VIP packages are available. Tickets are available here.