INTERVIEW: Frank Zappa’s ‘Roxy & Elsewhere’ lives on with Dweezil

Roxy & Elsewhere is one of the landmark live albums of the 1970s and an important bullet point in the long resume of the late Frank Zappa. Fans of the album can hear the release in its entirety on the Zappa Plays Zappa tour featuring Frank’s son, Dweezil Zappa. The tribute, which features other hits from Frank’s catalog, will play the State Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J., Tuesday, March, 4.

“Well, this record has always been one of my favorites, but it’s been a fan favorite for a long time, too,” Dweezil said recently in a phone interview. “And it really has a great selection and variety of music on the whole record, so it’s one that I think gives a great introduction to the uninitiated.”

Although playing the same songs every night could prove tiresome, Dweezil and his band keep things fresh by working in improvisation. The set list might be firm, but the outcome is almost always different.

“It’s like they’re a living, breathing organism,” Dweezil said of the songs. “So every night, even though we’re playing the same songs, they sort of ebb and flow in different ways. … I think one of the ones that tend to be fun is the solo section in ‘More Trouble Everyday,’ and Frank just plays an unbelievable solo on that song. It’s just completely tearing it up.”

Roxy & Elsewhere features many fan favorites, including “Cheepnis,” which is an ode to cheap horror films, and “Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?,” an orchestral work. The entire album finishes with the “Be-Bop Tango,” an audience participation number.

“We always invite people up to participate in the ‘Be-Bop Tango,’” Dweezil said, adding that it’s often hit or miss whether the audience knows how to dance at the right parts. “Sometimes they’re too shy. Sometimes they’re too drunk, but we’ve had some pretty good things that we’ve seen. Some people go pretty crazy. … A couple, they came with their baby. So the baby was not even 1, and so the lady came up and was using the baby like a puppet. That was pretty fun.”

The Zappa Plays Zappa tours have been circulating the United States for a number of years. The Roxy shows were launched last year to honor the 40th anniversary of the album. Even those unfamiliar with Frank’s music will probably find themselves attracted to the tunes.

“There’s a lot of really funky and groovy stuff. It may be the funkiest records of Frank’s, but it’s got so many flavors on there. You know, you have the R&B kind of stuff, the avant-garde with the ‘Be-Bop Tango.’ You’ve got straight rock and blues, so there’s a ton of good stuff. But the variety within the compositions is also great. Things like ‘Echidna’s Arf’ going into ‘Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?,’ that music right there, you know, 40 years ago that must have been trailblazing, and it still is. There’s nothing that sounds like that. Nobody writes with those rhythms, that kind of orchestration. … I tell people usually at the beginning of the show, let’s put this into perspective, this may be 40 years old, but there’s still nothing that sounds like it. So I think it’s from the future.”

When the original shows took place at Los Angeles’s Roxy and other places, Dweezil was only a few years old. Although he remembers attending his father’s concerts at a young age, these particular shows escaped him. However, the songs filled his young mind, especially “Cheepnis,” which is about those cheap monster movies where the strings attached to the villains are more apparent than the acting skills. “He used to screen movies in the basement on a projector, and we would watch movies like It Conquered the Earth and Brainiac and other things that were very poorly crafted,” he said.

Dweezil started the ZPZ tours to bring Frank’s music to a new generation of listeners and musicians. Envisioning an ensemble with some awesome repertory music at its disposal, he sought band members who had no previous affiliation with his father. He also didn’t want to modernize the songs by adding hip-hop rhythms. Dweezil was after purity.

“People always say, ‘Well, how do you expect a modern audience to enjoy this music unless you make it sound modern,’ and what they mean by that is that you’re supposed to make it sound like hip-hop or change it and do some stuff. And Frank wouldn’t do any of that stuff because that wouldn’t matter to him.”

The tours have eaten up so much time that Dweezil has been unable to focus on his solo career. However, if concertgoers listen close enough there’s a new tune called “Dinosaur” that serves as the walk-out song for the band. By focusing on Zappa Plays Zappa, Dweezil has seen a shift among the fan base for both him and his father’s music.

“One of the strange things that I didn’t really envision about this project is that because of the length of time that we have been carrying it on, a lot of the people that come to these shows as people that have never heard Frank’s music, they hear our versions of it. They get used to this band, and they become fans of the band and hearing the band play this stuff,” he said. “There’s a guy that was at a show last night, and he was saying, ‘Tomorrow is my 50^th show.’ And he flies in from Paris all over the place to see stuff, and he didn’t even Frank that many times. He saw Frank nine times, and he’s seen us 50 times.”

Before most Zappa Plays Zappa concerts, including the one in New Brunswick, Dweezil offers a masterclass on how to play the guitar. The lessons are taught to students of varying experience. He tries to give them a mental approach that encourages improvisation.

“Yesterday there was a kid that came to the class, and he was wearing a kilt, and so was his father. And I asked him if he was going to a bagpipe festival or something, and it turned out that he wears a kilt all the time to raise money because he’s a cancer survivor. And he was in the audience as well, and toward the end of the show a lot of the audience came down toward the front, you know, in the encore, and I saw him. So I pulled him up on stage and had him play my guitar during the solo for ‘Florentine Pogen.’ So he got to come up and play, and then tell people about his website and get his message out there. So that was good.”

No matter where Dweezil’s musical journeys take him, either further into his father’s catalog or venturing into new territory, the guitarist will be ready for the challenge. Frank’s music is too complex and too demanding to be on “cruise control,” as Dweezil put it.

“It will jump up and bite you every single time you try to play it live because there’s a human quality in executing these hard parts,” he said. “It’s like you’re training for the Olympics all the time to do this stuff. You have to stick the landing. You can’t physically perfect everything like a robot and do it every single time exactly the same way. So really you have to be on your toes and ready to react in the moment, so that’s why as a musician, this is the greatest music to play.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Zappa Plays Zappa featuring Dweezil Zappa will bring the Roxy & Elsewhere 40th anniversary tour to the State Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J., Tuesday, March 4. Click here for more information.