Listen to the Frank Zappa interview

By Marc D. Allan

“There are certain things I might have said in a different way,” Frank Zappa says when asked if he had any regrets about the first 25 years of his career. “But basically, there it is.”

And that’s why Frank Zappa is revered by his fans _ because he says and does what he believes, and never lets commercial considerations deter him.

He stood up to the Parents’ Music Resource Center and its warning labels on record albums, stepped into Eastern Europe to help American businesses establish ties in formerly communist countries, and refused to apologize for songs such as Jewish Princess, which offended some organizations.

Zappa’s latest stand is against record bootleggers. He’s taken them on in a project called Beat the Boots, a set of 10 albums he has stolen back from the bootleggers who originally released them.

Zappa and Rhino Records have taken 10 bootlegs, cleaned up the sound slightly and improved the packaging. The final kick: These releases will sell for less than their bootleg counterparts.

“Somebody recently sent me a book called A Guide to the Alternative Recordings of Frank Zappa,” Zappa says during a phone interview from his California home. “There are over 400 titles listed in it.

“In 25 years, I’ve made over 50 albums, so it’s eight times as many bootlegs as real albums that I’ve done. I don’t think anybody else has been subjected to that kind of bootleg scrutiny.”

The authorized bootlegs will be released as a boxed set in vinyl and cassette formats and individually on compact discs.

“I can understand what the fan’s motivation is (for buying bootlegs), but whether or not they get satisfied at the point where they spend the money for the bootleg is the question. A lot of the bootlegs are just ripping them off, the sound quality is so bad.”

Zappa’s not one to allow himself or his fans to be ripped off. In fighting against record-labeling, Zappa took his case to Congress while the record industry’s most commercially successful acts _ Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Prince and others _ stayed silent.

His attitude was that labeling would encourage censorship and inhibit musicians, who then would spend their careers trying to modify their lyrics “to suit the spiritual needs of an imaginary 11-year-old.”

Mainstream media coverage, Zappa says, portrayed him as a lunatic.

But when he went on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, the audience gave him a rousing ovation.

“That’s the discrepancy that has always intrigued me, because the way in which in so-called mainstream press is always to regard me as a lunatic,” Zappa says. “I’m the convenient lunatic, whenever they want to hold up an example of what you shouldn’t be as an American.

“But if I get in front of an audience, like Johnny Carson’s audience, which is not very avant garde, they know me and they like me and they treat me like I’m OK, like I’m a human being. This kind of reception is at odds with the official line usually maintained by the mainstream press.”

Zappa’s insistence on speaking his mind extends to his own work as well. In The Real Frank Zappa Book, published in 1989, Zappa acknowledged that he can’t read music and can only play what he can imagine.

“The thing that’s amazing about what I play is that I manage to get away with it. There’s a lot of wiggling your fingers and hoping that you get it right involved in there. I’m not a virtuoso, I don’t practice and I can’t play (just) anything.”

That’s difficult to believe when you hear a song like Black Napkins, from Zoot Allures, which is a blur of notes combined to make a brilliant instrumental.

Zappa says the song was among the first he wrote for guitar _ and he was pleased to know that it had been admired.

“We were playing in New Jersey. This, I guess, is in the late ’70s. We were in this small theater. A woman, I guess she was in her 40s, asked to come backstage and talk with me.

“The guards let her in and she was really very nice. She showed me a picture of her son. He had just died. He wanted to be buried in my T-shirt and he wanted to have Black Napkins played at his funeral. So she wanted to meet me.

“That’ll shake you up before you go back on stage.”