'So What Sort Of Music Do You Play?'

As you can imagine, this is a question that comes up quite regularly in any musician's day-to-day existence… and it's getting harder and harder to answer. The reason, I think, is that we have become so fond of categorisation in music – and, worse still, many of these convenient little compartments are subject to further division into subcategories.

I play what I think is termed as being 'acoustic fingerstyle' guitar. That's what I and various other practitioners call it anyway; trouble is, no one seems to understand what it actually is. I've had some people say to me, 'Oh, you mean country music?' or 'What, like jazz?' and neither is right, as far as I'm concerned.

It's the same in record shops. If you play within the remit of this particular musical niche and are lucky enough to have attracted record company support, you're quite likely to find your CDs stored under 'World', 'New Age' or 'Jazz'. Furthermore, in the digital domains like iTunes, eMusic and their like (where you yourself have little or no control regarding which category your music ends up under) there's no provision for acoustic fingerstyle. My CDs have been placed under 'Relaxation' or 'New Age' or 'Music For Meditation' and, as far as I'm concerned, it's not anything like. Certainly, if I was going shopping for CDs by Michael Hedges or Pierre Bensusan, looking under 'new age' or 'world' wouldn't be my first port of call.

Things used to be a lot more simple. Once, I'm told, your music was either classical, commercial or folk. Take it or leave it. The definitions were easy to understand: classical was anything involving orchestras or ensembles playing Bach, Berlioz or Beethoven, commercial was pop and rock and folk was... well, everything else.

Under this form of categorisation I'm a folk musician in that I don't consider myself a part of music's commercial landscape. Seriously; ask my accountant.

It's easy to think that this is really a trivial problem and unlikely to have too much of an impact on a career; after all, does it really matter where your music is filed in the public consciousness? Well, yes it does. The problem reveals itself when you try to get gigs, for instance.

If you play in a blues or a covers band, it's likely that you'll be able to make a promoter or club/pub owner understand what it is you play much easier than I would. Blues? What? Like Muddy Waters, Joe Bonamassa, Eric Clapton – that kind of thing? Covers band? What? Rock covers? Queen, Bad Company, bit of Supergrass, Elbow thrown in for the students? Deal done. But 'acoustic fingerstyle'? What's that?

You see my problem. I guess it's a matter of time before we acoustic minstrels find a home under one roof or other. It may be that a champion will reveal himself; someone will have a hit with a film theme or something and immediately afterwards everything reboots and we can say, 'You know, like so-and-so...' when asked the inevitable question.

But until then, it's a no man's land of misunderstanding.

The Wonders Of The Internet

Just trying to set up a selling account for my website and it's driving me mad!

Thought I'd share that with everyone...

Hard Shoulder

As around .0000001% of the world knows, last September I released my second album of acoustic fingerstyle guitar tomfoolery on the public at large. Obviously, in such circumstances, the thing to do is to get oneself onto the touring/gigging circuit and make people aware of its existence. After all, success in the music biz is only around 10% having a good product out there, the other 90% is down to letting people know about it.

All well and good, then. But, as everyone knows, the best laid plans of mice, men and acoustic guitarists oft go awry and in January of this year I began getting pain in my left shoulder. Worse still, it all felt very familiar and I knew what was coming…

Anyone heard of a condition known as 'frozen shoulder'? The medical name for it is 'adhesive capsulitis' and it works its evil magic by gradually paralysing the shoulder joint and rewarding you with a bolt of very serious pain every time you try to move your arm. Not good for playing guitar, then.

To make matters worse and to illustrate the bitter irony of the situation still further (I'm not after sympathy here, honest) I'd had it before in the other shoulder back in 2003 and so I knew that it's effectively a very long slog in terms of recovery time as the condition can last between eight to 18 months.

There's nothing doctors can do except offer sympathy and any painkillers you choose. I chose Tramadol, because they worked last time, but despite the fact that they numb the pain quite effectively and allow you to drift off into sleep, they also have nasty side effects – even more so when you stop taking them.

It's now July and I'm only just getting most of the movement back in my arm (it never fully returns) and experiencing little or no pain and so it's time to get back out there. Taking seven months off sick when you've got new tunes to play people is nothing short of a disaster, which is why I've chosen to re-release 'Arboretum' on my own label and kinda start all over again.

So, as I type, the album is being pressed onto those silver shiny discs that some of you might remember and at the same time being delivered in digital form to all the usual outlets on the internet. There are even dates in the diary, starting with a gig at this year's London Acoustic Guitar Show at Olympia. Sunday 11th September on the Acoustic Café stage at 2.30pm, to be precise.

Now, with a seven month lay-off behind me, the only thing I have to do is get back to practising like a maniac to restore the strength in my left hand and arm – and trying to remember all the pieces!

O.K. So We're Not Exactly Radiohead...

Depending on who you happen to be talking to at the time, the current state of the music industry is either

a) A right bloody mess

Or

b) A fertile landscape ripe for entrepreneurial derring-do

The followers of answer 'a' will quote you statistics about the slow and painful demise of the CD as a platform for music and how piracy has spoiled things for everybody, whilst the 'b' camp is the exclusive domain of the web gurus and sundry other optimists.

So who is likely to be right?

Well, one thing's for certain; the world would be a poorer place without music – either live or recorded – and so it's definitely going to survive all of this. The question is how?

There are folk out there who believe that the future of live music is a thing which is not under their control, but I think it is. You'll have guessed that I tend to follow the 'b' thinkers and so I'm going to set out one way – and I'm sure there are many more – whereby music lovers all around the country (and most likely the world) can shape the future by taking back some of the control.

I currently work as part of an acoustic instrumental duo with another guitarist called Ben Powell. At present, we're trying to put together some gigs for later on in the year when we can get on the road and come out to play for people. My idea as to how this might come about is to ask people who enjoy our kind of music (and you'll be able to sample some at the end of this sermon) to get in touch with us and tell us about venues in their particular area who put on this type of music.

I understand that there are loads of places across the UK where a room above a pub, a cellar, village hall, arts centre or community area is set aside on a regular basis to host live music. They're not necessarily known on the national circuit because they're small, off the beaten track, run on a tight budget and generally don't get a look in when more renowned artists go on tour. But as far as we're concerned, all it takes is a contact, either in the form of a phone number or email address and we'll make the arrangements to turn up and play.

We're not Radiohead. We don't have legions of fans. We don't insist on four figure fees and five star accommodation. But we put on a good show, people enjoy themselves, the venue sells some beer (and a fruit-based drink for the ladies), the promoter earns a bit, we earn a bit and so everybody wins.

We'll even give a pair of our CDs and free entry to people who give us contacts that turn into gigs. How about that?

So here's the commercial. First of all, here's a video of me playing a track from my album 'Arboretum'. It was recorded live in the studio and so what you see is what you get:



And here's Ben, playing a track from his album at this year's Celtic Connections in Glasgow:



If you think that you might be able to put us in touch with a venue in your area, please drop us a line by clicking here.

Hopefully, we'll see you on the road!

Highway To Hello?

As a part-time scribbler for magazines, I get sent press releases via email on a daily basis. Recently, I've been noticing that many of them are worded very similarly. So allow me to give you a glimpse into the inbox of a calloused, highly cynical hack for just a few moments. A typically worded email goes something like this:

Introducing [insert name here; always someone you've never heard of, commonly female and usually coyly misspelt like 'Kandi' or 'Syndii'] an amazing new voice on the R&B scene! Her latest single [insert almost literally anything] was voted 'Most Exciting New Thing' by radio station WXBJ.com [i.e. an internet-based radio station with around 17 listeners]. 'Kandi' [or whoever] will be performing [i.e.'miming'] her new single at [insert name of tiny backstreet, London-based clubette] on [probably next week]. RSVP to reserve a press pass [or not, we're not exactly expecting a stampede]. Free bar [this is the clincher – journalists are inveterate alcoholics].

Now I'm all for new talent breaking through, but I wonder where all these young divas are coming from; and, more importantly, who is fronting the money for a professional PR company to distract us merry inksters away from on-line gaming and internet porn for long enough to give a damn? Anyone who has ever tried to release something into the vast emptiness of hyperspace (where no one can hear you scream, let alone play anything nice) will know that it takes a small fortune to launch an artist these days. The figure was recently put at $1M by some overpaid researcher at the BBC and that money has to come from somewhere.

One thing for sure, these would-be pop princesses (not forgetting the occasional prince) are coming from somewhere and I'm pretty sure that it's no longer the club scene like it used to be in the perceived 'good old days'. Their press pictures don't reveal them to be road-weary chanteuses; more like fresh-faced debutantes that you wouldn't think twice about introducing to mother. So is there an academy, an agency or whatever who try the well-worn principal of 'some of this sh*t has to stick' knowing that they only need one hit on their hands to pay for their rabid entrepreneurialism across the board?

It's beyond me...

HMV And A Dying Breed...

I'm sure that many will have seen the forecast of store closures from record retail giant HMV in the press recently. I believe the first estimate was that 60 outlets were due for closure but recent updates have put this figure nearer 40. Of course, we can see this as just another nail in the coffin for our friend the CD as downloads, legal or otherwise, begin to dominate the music consumer consciousness. But is that the whole story?

OK, stores close every day and it could be said that it's all part of a kind of natural selection out there in the retail jungle, but a casual comment made in today's press made me wonder if HMV have fallen victim to their own ambitions.

If, as I suspect, HMV's strategy was to dominate the high street by elbowing out the smaller independent record shops then they really shot themselves in the foot when they began realising it. The past 12 months or so has seen stock reduced across HMV stores to the effect that you don't have to wander too far away from the beaten track to find that the album you want on the day isn't any longer available on site but subject to a 'sorry, but we can order it for you' initiative. And if you think I'm talking about wanting an album by some obscure 1960s folk artist, I'm not; my local HMV didn't have any of the 60 plus albums by Frank Zappa in stock last time I looked!

This can't be helping, surely? Up until now, artist back catalogue was big business and there's no reason to believe that this trend has changed. Consumers with mammoth vinyl collections are probably still replacing treasured albums on CD to this day and it's quite likely that a lot of these purchases are on spec impulse buys. I've been in the situation myself when I've seen an album from my past for sale at £3 in a shop and a combination of pure nostalgia and the sense that I'm getting a good deal has witnessed me walk out with it in a bag.

I know that downloading music is probably the future, but I personally mourn the demise of the old curiosity record shops and their hoard of treasure.

Frank Zappa Interview: March 1993

Frank Zappa would have been 70 on the 21st December 2010. In order to mark this in a very personal way, here is a transcript of the interview I did with Frank on March 23rd 1993 for Guitarist magazine. His album 'The Yellow Shark' was due for release and his ongoing health situation meant that the interview couldn't be scheduled in advance as normal; in fact I had only two hours' notice on this occasion. It was an honour to speak to a man whose music had given me so much pleasure over the years and the resulting interview was one of the most memorable of my career as a music journalist.

The interview was carried out on the telephone. At the time, Frank was working whenever he felt well enough to do so. I was aware that he was doing me an enormous favour by taking the time away from the studio. In fact, our conversation began with something of a reminder of this fact from the man himself...

“We’re right in the middle of a session here and so I’m taking time off to do this,” he said. I got the impression that he really didn’t want to be talking me at all, but I was genuinely a fan of his music and didn’t want to think that I was just another career journalist and he was just a notch on my CV.

I had heard an excerpt of the new album on BBC 2’s Late Show - a track called ‘The Be-Bop Tango’ which originally featured on Zappa’s ‘Roxy And Elsewhere’ album and told him so - adding that it wouldn’t be the same without the girl from the audience on the original track who says on mic, ‘I’ll do anything you say, Frank…’

“Heh heh - what was her name? Lana!”

After this, Frank relaxed a little. At least he knew I’d listened to at least one of his albums. I told him I was going to ask some guitar related questions…

“Well, there’s not anything guitar related [on ‘The Yellow Shark’] although there’s a guitar player and a mandolin player in the Ensemble Moderne [the classical outfit who had recorded the new album].”

What attracted you to the instrument in the first place?

“I liked the way it sounded.”

You’ve cited Johnny Guitar Watson as an influence before.

“I used to listen to him all the time,” confirms Zappa, “and I used to listen to Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown.”

So it was the latter end of the 50s blues period that first got you interested?

“Yeah.”

You’ve spoken too of an interst in 50’s do-wop records.

“Yes, I like that music.”

Mixed together with your interest in classical music as well - it’s a fairly bizarre combination.

“I just listened to it and liked what I heard. It became my musical world.”

The first piece by Edgar Varese you heard was…

“‘Ionisations’”

You’ve always been interested in percussion?

“Yeah, in fact the piece I’m working on now is all percussion. It has some synthesiser sustaining things in it, but 99% of what’s being heard in this piece that we’re working on today is all different kinds of percussion instruments.”

I remember you saying on a radio interview once about writing ‘percussive harmony’.

“Oh sure. You can write rhythmic dissonance or you can write the equivalent of rhythmic consonance, too. What I would describe as a dissonant rhythm is 23/24, where things would rub up against each other in a dissonant way in just the same way that notes that are a half-step apart have a certain tendency to twinge your ear. Rhythms that are fractionally off from each other create another kind of linear dissonance. A consonant kind of rhythm would be like march or disco music where everything is ‘boom, boom, boom…’"

Common time like 4/4 or simple 2/4, you mean?

“Yeah.”

What did you learn from Johnny Guitar Watson records? Was it the pentatonic approach?

“Well, you know, what Watson was doing was not just pentatonic scales. One of the things I admired about him was his tone; this wiry, kind of nasty, aggressive and penetrating tone, and another was the fact that the things that he would play would often come out as rhythmic outbursts over the constant beat of the accompaniment.”

Is that something you tried to incorporate into your own playing?

“Yes. It seemed to me that was the correct way to approach it, because it was like talking or singing over a background. There was a speech influence to the rhythm.”

What was the first guitar that you had?

“It didn’t have a make on it - it had been kinda sandblasted. My brother got it for $1.50 at an auction and it was an archtop, f-hole, ugly motherf***er with the strings about a half-inch off the fingerboard.”

That’s usually a good sort of guitar to start with…

“It builds your wrist up…”

Everything you play afterwards feels like going downhill after one of those.

“Heh heh, yeah. My father had a guitar which he kept in a closet, but I never played that. I didn’t really decide to mess around with the thing until we got this god awful thing at the auction. That’s why I liked it - because it was so tinny-sounding. It was just an acoustic guitar, but for an acoustic instrument it was moving closer to the direction of that wiry tone I liked with Johnny Guitar Watson, especially if you picked it right next to the bridge.”

Did it have one of those moveable wooden bridges that wrecks the intonation?

“I had no idea what intonation was! I didn’t find out for maybe five or six years that you even had to think about things like intonation It was bad enough just tuning the damn thing up with the pegs, let alone worrying about whether you’re going to be in tune at the octave.”

When did you make the move to electric?

“The guitar my father had was a round holed guitar of anonymous make and I stuck one of those DeArmond sound hole pickups in that. So it would be one of those bad-sounding magnetic pick-ups that you stick in the sound hole of a normal acoustic guitar. It would merely amplify the acoustic sound - so it wasn’t a real electric guitar. I guess it was around four or five years later that I actually got an electric guitar. There was a music store not far from my house, and I rented this Telecaster for $15 a month. Eventually I had to give it back, because I couldn’t make the payments on it any more.”

Were you ever in High School bands?

“I had a band when I was either a sophomore or a junior in High School I actually started off as a drummer, playing in a band in San Diego, but that didn’t last very long.”

A lot of guitarists started out playing drums - like Eddie Van Halen, or Extreme's Nuno Bettencourt, both of whom seem to have developed solid right hand techniques as a result.

“Well, I don’t know whether I could vouch for that because I wasn’t a very good drummer! My main drawback was that I didn’t have good hand-to-foot co-ordination. I could play a lot of stuff on the snare and the tom-toms and the cymbal and everything, but I couldn’t keep an even beat on the kick drum while I was doing all this which was one of the reasons why I was no longer employed as a drummer - nobody could dance to it.”

This is something that obviously didn’t translate onto guitar with hand-to-hand co-ordination.

“Yeah, hand-to-hand I’m fine. The only thing I had to co-ordinate with my feet was the wah-wah pedal and turning little stomp boxes on and off.”

How would you sum up your guitar style on the early Mothers recordings?

“It was okay, but back then the guitar wasn’t a featured instrument in the way it was on the later albums. As far as a precedent for it... I don’t think there was anything you could compare it to; it was the only way I knew how to do it. There was no reason to do it another way, and anyway, everybody else was doing it the other way.”

The rock guitar influences that are the most common are the ‘60s icons, players like Clapton and Hendrix...

“When ‘Freak Out’ and ‘Absolutely Free’ were done, there wasn’t any Hendrix. We met Hendrix in the summer of ‘67; he sat in with us at the Garrick Theatre, so we’d already made those albums before I even knew that he existed. But Mike Bloomfield was a popular guitar player, he was in the Butterfiled Blues Band. I saw Butterfield when they came to Los Angeles, but I don’t own any of their records.

“Actually, I think my playing is probably more derived from the folk music records that I heard; middle Eastern music, Indian music, stuff like that.”

What specifically?

“For years I had something called ‘Music On The Desert Road’, which was a recording of all kinds of different ethnic musics from different places in the Middle East. I used to listen to that all the time - I liked that kind of melodic feel. I listened to Indian music, Ravi Shankar and so forth, before we did the ‘Freak Out’ album. The idea of creating melody from scratch based on an ostinato or single chord that doesn’t change - that was the world that I felt most comfortable with.”

You prefer to improvise over a single chord vamp.

“If you listen to Indian classical music, it’s not just pentatonic. Some of the Ragas that they use are very chromatic, all sustained over a root and a fifth that doesn’t change, and by using these chromatic scales they can imply all these other kinds of harmonies. The chords don’t change; it’s just the listener’s aspect that gets to change, based on how the melody notes are driven against the ground bass.”

That sounds like a parallel with your own guitar improvisations, where the band plays a fairly straightforward rhythmic vamp, and you insert dissonance via the solo - you use a lot of chromatic tones and whole tone scales in your solos.

“Well, you stick them in where you think they belong when you think they belong. Sometimes you guess right, sometimes you guess wrong. The most dangerous thing is improvising with a band and thinking ‘Okay, now’s the time to play that diminished scale,’ and somebody in the band is thinking, ‘Now’s the time to play a major chord.’ Those kinds of accidents do happen...”

Your guitar style underwent a marked change around the time of ‘Overnite Sensation’.

“That was partly because of the rhythm section, and partly because of the equipment I was using. I imagine that anybody’s guitar playing would change if one day your keyboard player was Don Preston, and suddenly the next day it’s George Duke - know what I mean? Or the difference between (drummers) Jimmy Carl Black and Chester Thompson - that certainly made a difference. Or the difference between Roy Estrada and Ton Fowler. When you have a completely different rhythm section with a different musical perspective, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of it.”

So things became tighter?

“Much tighter and harmonically much more interesting because George is a more interesting keyboard player.”

It was you who got George Duke into playing synthesiser, wasn’t it?

“I had to almost strangle him to make him do it! Up to that point, the closest he would get to a synthesiser would be to use an Oberheim ring modulator that he would plug his Fender Rhodes into and every once in a while he would jerk the handle on it and get some sort of a metallic sound out of his Rhodes. It took quite a bit or persuasion to get him to pick up an ARP Odyssey. Also, I knew he had a really nice voice, but it was hard to get him to sing and now he sings all the time.”

There have been many musicians that have gone through the various manifestations of the Mothers and you later bands who have come to prominence. There’s a parallel there perhaps to the Miles Davis bands - almost like a music college or finishing school.

“Well, if you come to it with that attitude, then it’s true - you can derive a lot of information from doing the job. However, most of the musicians look at it as just a way to earn an income. It takes an exceptional musician to work in the band and to really appreciate the type of training and information that is being delivered during rehearsals for the show. So you can either learn a lot of different things in the band, or you can just learn your part, play the gig and pick up your paycheck. I’ve had both kinds.”

You’ve had some remarkable musicians in the band; Steve Vai being a fairly obvious example. But Chester Thompson, Adrian Belew, Scott Thunes, Arthur Barrow…

“Terry Bozio - he was here yesterday for a visit…”

Now you always cite his playing on ‘Hands With A Hammer’ from Vol 3 of ‘You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore’ as a near perfect drum sound.

“That’s true and you know it was recorded with just one of those AKG Dummy Head microphones and a C24 - there’s no close miking on the set at all. It’s all just ambient miking. It’s really a fat-sounding kit.”

If we can move back to that radical change in your guitar sound…

“It also changed because I started playing an SG.”

Was this your custom built one?

“The first one I had was stock, I got it second hand. At a gig in Pheonix, Arizona this guy came up to me after the show with this hand-made SG and he said he would like to sell it to me and I played it and liked it and bought it for $500. As a matter of fact, Dweezil’s guitar roadie was just here and he’s taken it down to get it strung up with really light strings.”

So you could put the difference in your guitar sound down, at least in part, to a new instrument?

“Not just a different instrument, but also different amplification because prior to that time I’d been playing either a Gold Top Les Paul or a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster, which was a large, fat, three pick-up jazz guitar which really had uncontrollable feedback. I was playing through a Fender amp or an Acoustic amp with a fairly nondescript tone - I just didn’t have enough money to invest in new equipment. But by the early ‘70s I was playing this SG, and I switched over to Marshalls, and started playing through a device that a friend built for me, which had compression, phase shifting and some other little specialities.”

Wasn’t there a control you had fitted to one of your guitars which acted as a sort of parametric eq?

“That came later.”

In the past, you’ve quoted ‘One Size Fits All’ as being your favourite album.

“Well. I think it was probably a good example of what the band with George Duke and Ruth Underwood could do. I think it’s a good sounding album, representing that group.”

Volume 2 of ‘You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore’ features that band live in Helsinki…

“Yep.”

…and the full version of the solo from Inca Roads shows just how dramatic your editing was on the ‘One Size Fits All’ version - where did you pick up your editing technique?

“I started around ‘62, before The Mothers, when I was working in Cucamunga.”

Those were all razor edits - literally cutting up the tape?

“That’s right.”

But everything’s right on the beat. You’d never know that you’re not hearing the complete story.

“I’m a pretty good editor...”

What about your technique of editing together a song from completely different performances - even different bands?

“They come in on the beat!”

I was thinking of the ‘Ship Arriving Too Late’, from the ‘You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore’ series.

“Oh yeah, where it goes from the 84 to the 82 band?”

How much time does an edit like that take?

“Well, it took years. I worked on it for five or six years.”

You’re also a fearsome archivist of your own material…

“I do have a large vault with material in it.”

Any idea how many hours of material it represents in total?

“Heh heh, No [laughs]. There’s mountains of stuff in every format from little five inch reels of quarter inch tape a 1 7/8 IPS all the way up to digital video and all stops in between.”

You’ve also taken live backing tracks and superimposed studio performances on top - for instance, the ‘Sheik Yerbouti’ album...

“Yes, but I’ve gone in the other direction, too. For example, ninety percent of the guitar solos on the ‘Joe’s Garage’ album were from live shows, pasted on studio tracks. In the studio, they called it the ‘Ampex Guitar’ - I had all these quarter-inch tapes of guitar solos that I liked from the ‘79 tour, and when we went into the studio to do ‘Joe’s Garage’, I would just go through my files to see what key a certain solo was in, and just experimentally hit the start button on the playback machine and lay it onto the multi-track.”

Didn’t you have trouble with tuning variation?

“Well, we did that with a VSO. We did have to wiggle the pitch around to make sure it sounded like it was in the right key.”

At one time, the live band used to tune to the vibes as a source of fairly constant pitch, didn’t they?

“Yeah, when we had vibes in the band. Remember, we were on the road long before there were Peterson strobe tuners. If you tuned up to a piano that happened to be somewhere on the stage, there wasn’t any guarantee that the piano itself was in tune. So, for the first five or six years of touring, it was really a crap shoot as to whether you’d be in tune with anything.”

You overdubbed the guitar solo on ‘The Purple Lagoon’ from ‘Live In New York’, because you recorded it on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and had to fill the gap where John Belushi did an act as a Samurai bebop musician.

“Yes, that’s right, although he didn’t do that act in the regular live show. I overdubbed it with a home-made SG through a Pignose amp and an Eventide Harmoniser set at 99.”

Can you remember which guitar you used?

“Yeah, it was the hand made SG.”

How did you come to own the fire-damaged ex-Jimi Hendrix Strat?

“Well, there was this guy named Howard Parker - they called him ‘H’ - who was Hendrix’s roadie, gofer and general assistant. He stayed at our house for a couple of months in the late ‘60s, and he had this guitar which Hendrix had given to him - I thought it was from the Miami concert. He gave it to me and we had it hanging on the wall as a decoration for years and years, and then I met some guys who were capable of putting guitars back together, so I had it done.”

When I spoke to Dweezil he said that you still have the original neck.

“Yeah, somewhere around here…”

Does it have an individual sound?

“Yes, it did have a sound all its own, especially after it was reconstructed, but that sound was not what you would expect from the Hendrix guitar. It didn’t sound like all the Hendrix guitar solos you’ve ever heard. It was a different kind of sound.”

It’s gone through various pick-up transformations as well, hasn’t it?

“Yeah, it used to have a chrome scratchplate and it had, I think, at that time a Barcus Berry in the neck and also a preamp…”

Didn’t you use that guitar on a couple of tracks from the ‘Shut Up And Play Your Guitar’ set?

“If it’s in the liner notes, it’s true, but I can’t remember off hand. I didn’t play it that often because one of the characteristics of that guitar was it liked to feed back unless you were in exactly the right environment where you could stand in exactly the right relationship to the amplifier.”

What was the story behind the 1988 band?

“Actually, it didn’t start off large and get smaller - it started medium, and got large. It was a 12-piece band, and an argument broke out between Scott Thunes and just about everyone else in the band apart from me and Mike Keneally. The others all decided that they hated Scott’s guts; it was very weird.

“We were almost at the end of the European portion of the tour in the early summer of ‘88, and we had other dates booked in the United States - big, outdoor, high-paying gigs, but because most of them refused to go onstage with this guy, I had to cancel them all. There was no time to replace anybody at all, no breaks in the tour to rehearse anybody new, so I just had to break it up.”

Was that one of the formats of the band that you were most happy with?

“WelI I was very happy with it and also the audiences really liked it too, and the reviewers thought it was a great band. It was unique because it combined a very strong five-piece horn section with all kinds of electronic stuff, with effects on the percussion section, on the drums, multiple keyboards - a very interesting blend of this horn harmony and very strange sound-effects.”

I missed seeing the band on that tour. I was on the way to Scotland the day you played Wembley…

“Wembley was the only concert on the tour that got a bad review! Someone wrote that we were all too old to play rock’n’roll. But all the rest of the reviews, even Rolling Stone writing about our performance in New York City, surprisingly gave a good review.”

The resulting live CD of that tour - ‘The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life’ - is testimony to that.

“Think about it, there are no overdubs on that, either. All those little effects and things coming in, that’s just the way it was on the live show.”

You’ve got sampled dog barks and stuff on that - was that the Synclavier?

“Yep.”

Were you generating that from a keyboard?

“There were three stations generating samples: there was Ed Mann, who had this whole vocabulary of dog barks and bubbles and weird shit, then there was Chad Wackerman who had all these strange percussion things hooked up to a big rig, and then there was the Synclavier which I could play when I wasn’t playing the guitar. There was a MIDI link between the other two stations and the Synclavier so that thay could trigger Synclavier samples while something else was going on.”

So you played your parts on keyboard?

“Yes, I sat down and played the keyboard.”

Did you ever try using a MIDI guitar to control the Synclavier?

“Yes, but I couldn’t make it work…”

Was that to do with your playing style?

“Well, I think in order to make it work, the detector only wants to hear the vibrations of a single string, and if you’re not constantly damping and muting and doing all sorts of gyrations, then the detector can’t really read accurate pitch. So if you’re playing on the top E string and you’ve got an A string ringing or something like that, it tends to f*ck things up. So you have to worry about damping the other strings while you’re playing and it’s just a technique that I’m not very good at.”

You pick with a lot of upstrokes…

“It’s just the way I learned.”

A lot of people will pick ‘downstrokes heavy’, but using a lot of upstrokes is fairly unique.

“It’s just the way I learned…”

What’s your attitude towards the guitar now?

“I seldom touch it. I was doing a little overdubbing here in the studio, but I don’t have calluses anymore. In a way, I think I used to be a guitarist, but not any more.”

How do you feel guitar-playing is going at the moment?

“I don’t think there’s much on the street that interests me. I mean, there are certain guys that I admire because they play well and they play musically - I like Jeff Beck and I like Allan Holdsworth and Michael Hedges. These people are all real geniuses at what they do. And I can’t remember the guy’s name - one of the heavy metal groups - I heard him play a solo that was just wonderful - really interesting stuff. But I can never remember the name of the group or the name of the guitar player! I just saw it whizzing past the channels on MTV.”

What interested you about it?

“Well, it was the whole approach to the solo. The tone was great, the intervals were great and it wasn’t the usual thing where a guy will just weedle away on any kind of scale that he thinks he can get away with in the middle of some fast, fuzztone background. This really had some thought to it.”

The Steve Vai-transcribed ‘Frank Zappa Guitar Book’ is amazingly complex-looking stuff...

“It’s even more amazing when you get him to tell you how he did it!”

He said he didn’t slow it down.

“He couldn’t slow it down. He was taking it off a cassette machine.”

He must have an incredible ear…

“Yup. [laughs]”

There’s a song you did called ‘The Jazz Discharge Party Hats’; I heard that when Vai was playing with you, he wrote out your skat-singing vocal part, and then overdubbed it on acoustic guitar.

“That’s right.”

That’s frightening!

“That’s right!”

And was it 100% accurate?

“It’s not 100% accurate, as a matter of fact, because if you play the pitches of his transcription without the vocal, there are certain things that just sound a little bit weird. I’d give it 99%, though. I don’t think there is anybody wandering around that knew they could do something like ‘The Jazz Discharge Party Hats’ unless some other lunatic said, ‘Do it’.

“When you’re transcribing something to publish in a magazine, that’s one thing. But when you’re transcribing it and you know that within a day or so you’re going to be overdubbing on the track, and you’re going to be sight-reading your own transcription, and it’s got to sync up exactly with what’s on the track - that’s when you’ll really know whether you’re a good transcriber or not. But that’s how he did it; he wrote it out, he came in, we turned on the tape, he read it and he did it in two or three takes. He even put in a string-scratch for when I laughed! I went ‘Huh, huh, huh’ and he’s got that little ‘scrape, scrape, scrape’ in there. He nailed everything.”

He got a lot of criticism for doing the big rock thing with Dave Lee Roth and Whitesnake.

“He should be able to do whatever he wants. If he wanted to go country and western he should do that, y’know?”

It’s interesting that not all the members of your bands have been able to read music...

“That’s right; maybe 10% have been readers, but the rest of them all had to learn it like a parrot.”

There seems to be a free exchange between your ‘orchestral’ pieces and your ‘rock band’ pieces. The transfer of ‘The Be-Bop Tango’ on ‘The Yellow Shark’ from band to orchestra is one example...

“Well, look at it this way; they’re pieces. Pieces of music that have harmony, melody and rhythm and some sort of an idea that makes them go, and the rest is just a matter of orchestration.”

How did you acquire your skills as an arranger?

“Trial and error.”

Did you have any formal training in harmony?

“Uh, I had a couple of classes early on. When I was a senior in high school I was an incorrigible student and one of the people in the office decided that maybe I would be socially better adjusted if I was given the opportunity to study something that I was actually interested in. So they arranged for me to go to the junior college to take a harmony course, one hour a week; that lasted for two or three months. I was studying out of the Walter Piston harmony book and I found it really boring. I probably finished up with a D grade, or something like that. There wasn’t anything there that I thought was going to be useful for what I wanted to do. I didn’t like the sound of the musical examples, I didn’t like all this f****ing Roman numeral horseshit that you have to deal with. Still, I guess it was better than putting up with the stupid classes they had at the high school.”

Is there a way to teach music in a constructive and ‘student friendly’ way?

“I think that it’s kinda useless to teach it, because what are you going to do? A person gets out of school, how’s he going to earn a living? In order to make money doing something that you call music, what you wind up doing to earn a living is not music - it’s shit! So why bother to teach them anything? It just seems so redundant to teach composition or harmony, when the people who will make the most money will come out of a metal shop or something like that, do something sub-mongoloid and make a fortune out of it.”

So you still stand by your quote of a few years back when you said that the average American wouldn’t know good music if it came up and bit them on the ass?

“That’s right. But I mean, it’s not their fault because they haven’t been exposed to anything other than the commercial stuff that is the non-stop stream of shit that comes out of the media.”

No ready solution, then?

“Well, how can you draw a conclusion about music unless you’ve heard a wide range of it? I think that the most useful thing that could be done in school is to put more emphasis on music appreciation and make sure that people, whether they’re going to become musicians or not, get to hear music from different cultures, music from different eras, different periods of classical music - something so that thay have some kind of a home base of knowledge from which they can make personal decisions.

“The cost of the music education course is so small compared to what it costs to buy new uniforms for the football team and the rest of the shit - and yet most schools in the United States don’t even teach it any more.”

Really?

“That’s right. I mean, I was lucky that I was in school at a time in American history where they not only had music appreciation courses, but had record libraries at the school. Even in the little towns where I lived you could go in and have access to a large portion of the Folkways library. If you wanted to listen to music from Tibet, or wherever, just go in there and find out what it is... Not any more.”

There was a story about you finding something in a harmony book that conventional wisdom said should never be done and you tried it and liked what you heard…

“It wasn’t a harmony text book, it was a counterpoint book. It was on the first page and what it said was, ‘You may not write the following intervals.’ The intervals were F and A, a major third, expanding to E and B, a fifth. It also said you could not write G and B, a major third, expanding to F and C, a fifth. So I played these things on the piano and said ‘Why? Why can’t we do this? This sounds great!'”

And so you closed the book?

“Yeah - I mean, I figured that if on the first page they were telling me that I would have to be going against something my ear immediately liked, then why should I learn the rest of that stuff?”

Tell us about the projects you’re working on at the moment.

“Well, there’s ‘Civilisation: Phaze III’ and the idea for that is to put it on stage as an ‘Opera Pantomime’. All the music and the sound effects will be included in the compact disc, so what you’d see on stage would be a dance pantomime manifestation of the action and the music.

“It’s due to be performed in Vienna in May of ‘94, but I’m still waiting to find out whether it’s actually going to happen. We got a fax from them yesterday - there’s been a meeting between the organiser and three of his partners who are talking about financing the thing, but I don’t have a contract with them yet. The CD is already done and finished, but I don’t know about a release date yet. If the performance in Vienna comes off on time, then I’ll hold the CD up until February of ‘94. But if they’re not going to stage it, then I’ll probably put it out in September.

“Another project I’m doing is called ‘The Lost Episodes’, which is a collection of unreleased studio cuts - quite early ones. Some of them come even from before Cucamunga. And that includes film soundtrack, ‘Run Home Slow’.

“And what I’m working on right at the moment is a Synclavier album called ‘Dance Me This’, which is designed to be used by modern dance groups. It’s probably not going to come out until next year.”

Happy birthday, FZ.

© 1993 David Mead