Frank Zappa |
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Wed. November 27.2002 1:55 PM EST |
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Jon Fishman: Z's Are a Few Of My Favorite ThingsPhish drummer talks frankly about his Zappa fixation by Jim Macnie |
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Jon Fishman (VH1.com) |
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Jon Fishman recalls a seminal moment in his ongoing appreciation for the music of Frank Zappa. It took place when the 37-year-old drummer was a budding teen. He was spinning the ribald bandleader's "Bobby Brown," a tune that mocks the stereotypical
Just a few months later, however, the Phish founder and Pork Tornado percussionist was smitten by Zappa's musical complexities, not his incisive crassness. Throughout the past 25 years, Fishman has gotten deeper and deeper into Zappa's canon, falling for the wild guitar solos, the rigorous compositional craft, and the runaway imagination that marked so many of the songwriter's tracks. Unsurprisingly, several of Zappas notions have worked their way into Phishs music. When Rykodisc, the label that issues Zappa's albums, asked Fishman to compile a disc of FZ pieces, he jumped at the chance. Culling tracks from over 30 records, Fishman settled on 16 faves. (At the same time, Primuss Larry LaLonde was making his own compilation at Rykos behest.) VH1 woke up Fishman while he was on tour with his Pork Tornado ensemble; its a band whose blend of deep chops and offhanded whimsy offers its own kind homage to Zappa. We talked about being busted by mom, how humor integrates with music, and why standing up for your artistic rights is a must. VH1: How did you become a poster boy for Zappa? Jon Fishman: I dont know if Im a poster boy. From Rykodiscs point of view its a creative way to promote his catalog. Hes not alive anymore to do it himself, so why not get people who have fan bases of their own to expose his music? Im the hugest Zappa fan in the world. I love his work, and they just asked me to do this album. I didnt even think twice about it. Hes influenced a lot of musicians in a big way, but doesn't always get credit. VH1: You're right. He doesnt really come up in as many conversations about seminal rockers as he used to. Fishman: Hes really more of a musicians musician. And its funny: I think musicians who were influenced by him are sometimes more likely to talk about Clapton, or someone else. In a way you almost dont think of Zappa - he was such a unique character. The first time I really acknowledged it was in a drum interview a long time ago. The guy said, "Who are your influences," and I said "Well, I basically started playing because of Led Zeppelin, and I really liked Mitch Mitchell, and I liked Bill Bruford, and I thought about Ansley Dunbar and Chester Thompson and Terry Bozzio, and I just kind of paused and said, all of Zappas drummers - as if were a collective group. It just sort of dawned on me. And actually I could say the same thing about all his keyboardists, and all of his vocalists. VH1: Was it tough to choose your faves for the disc? Fishman: Yeah, it was like how am I going to boil this down to 70 minutes?" First of all, as sort of a favor they sent me his entire catalog, so now Im sitting there with all these things I hadnt even heard before, going "Oh wow, I didnt know this existed. I just decided I'd got through them and decide what was my favorite tunes, and "Excentrifugal Forz" was the thing that killed me first, and the "Rat Tomago," too. I just made it like a personal retrospective. VH1: Thats probably a good way to get it done right? Fishman: It was the only way&There was a lot of stuff that I cut. I was on the Jazz Mandolin Project tour recently, and every night me and the road manager would drink a bottle of wine and listen to Village of the Sun and Echidnas Arf from Roxy and Elsewhere. We just listened to those over and over. I didnt even listen to the section of the album that I had chosen for my compilation ("Cheepniz," "Son Of Orange County," "More Trouble Every Day"). I had played them so many times, and I was discovering "Village" and this whole new part of the record. But luckily Larry LaLonde picked those for his record. VH1: You knew that he was also on the case as you were making your choices? Fishman: I did, and I was wondering how much crossover we would have. Its really funny, the stuff that he picked was actually a lot of the stuff that almost made mine. All my painful cuts made it to his [edition]. VH1: From the song choices, it seems youre more taken with late period Zappa. The drumming on that stuff is ultra precise because of the complexity of the music he was writing at the time. You agree? Fishman: Yeah, I think there was a certain kind of precision [in there] as compared to the earlier stuff, which was much more of an experimental kind of a thing. VH1: It seems odd that that kind of elaboration would speak to a young kid - you were an early teen when you discovered it. Is that just who you were at that point? Fishman: Well, I started playing my drums when I was eight and by the time I was into Zappa - I was probably about 12 or 13 so - I was starting to be real interested in the specific rhythms. Zappa was one of the people who taught me about odd time [signatures], and it was so well recorded, and so clear, that it was a real good audible example of how that music worked. In his earlier work, it was harder to pick out the specifics. Of course, these days I have a huge appreciation for the earlier stuff too. Its sort of like jazz, like Ornette Coleman and some of the Coltrane stuff where Elvin Jones really gets rolling - things like that. When I was younger I thought that stuff was really beautiful, but I had no idea what was going on. Now I can hear the intention behind it; I can hear the purposefulness of it. Thats when you get into the emotional and human details of whats going on. I think Zappa had great humanness to his music, but there was a lot of math. I think that math is subtler in some of the earlier stuff. VH1: Im actually a fan of the earlier stuff - that's what hit me first when I was a kid. I interviewed him a couple times and we had little arguments about it. He preferred his later stuff. Fishman: His focus was on being a composer. Im sure if you ask Stravinsky, he might say the same thing. That's why he turned to the Synclavier. He needed a machine to make the stuff work perfect. Of course, its great if you can find a guy that can play like Vinnie Caliuta - a rhythmic mutant who can play six different polyrhythms at once. For Zappa, who's writing stuff on paper, really composing, a guy Caliuta is a gift from god. VH1: You asked your mother to buy you the album with Cosmic Debris, but she said no. How did you feel? Fishman: It was really that. She heard me cranking Bobby Brown on the stereo while she was working out in the backyard, and she came in and was like What the hell is this? and I got caught with Sheik Yerbooty when I was like 12. I went looking for Cosmic Debris, but I didnt know which album had it, and when I saw the Zappa section in the store there was so many f*cking albums, and I was confused. And Sheik Yerbooty had a great cover; I just loved that picture of his face: hes smoking a cigarette and hes wearing the turban, and Im thinkin You know, at the end of Cosmic Debris he goes shunti and it had this sort of& VH1: Middle Eastern feel? Fishman: Yeah, it was some sort of "oh that must be it, vibe. "This must be an album with that song on it." Maybe it was some sort of prejudice. Whatever - I was so into that album. I was slightly disappointed [when it wasnt on there]. I went back and listened to that Rat Tamago. I listened to that everyday for a year. Then I eventually found Apostrophe, and somewhere along the line my Mom heard me blasting Bobby Brown. Zappa was sort of banned from the house until he played "I Am the Slime" on "Saturday Night Live." VH1: Were you too old to be embarrassed when your mother caught you with the dirty lyrics for "Bobby Brown"? Fishman: I was really pissed at her. We had a big fight. I was like, No you cant take away that album, thats my favorite album. VH1: Did you feel vindicated when she saw him on "Saturday Night Live," and thought he was cool? Fishman: Oh yeah, absolutely "I Am the Slime" is a song about how shitty TV is. My Mom was a big television addict, but she was also the first person to say This is garbage, why do I get sucked into this? And she was really very controlling in terms of how many hours us kids could watch. So she was excited to hear this great song about the slime oozing out from your TV set. VH1: Do you think Zappas comedy undercut the political messages he was trying to get across? Fishman: That whole "does humor belong in music" question? I don't think it undercut his stuff, no. I think it was just sort of who he was& you know the part in Joes Garage where hes saying truth is not wisdom, love is not music... I'm forgetting it right now. And he had another quote where he says stupidity is the largest element in the universe; some people say its hydrogen and I say its stupidity. I think the older he got and the more he experienced the more cynical he became. He took his political battles out of the music arena. In Washington he took those PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) people to task in there own arena, and he got very politically active. When all that censorship was going on, he was really the only artist defending all of us with any kind of real integrity and articulate intellect. I think came up against was such a huge wall of morons and I think that he was willing to deal with that in the political arena. But when it came to music, there was almost a sacred ground approach. Like, look, this is too wonderful a thing to have it be tainted with all the bullshit; Im not going to let the fools get to my music. I think a lot of the humor - bathroom or otherwise - was him just not giving a shit, just having fun. He also had a great way of telling funny stories that were right from his life, like For Calvin (And His Next Two Hitch-hikers). [Phish lyricist] Tom Marshall is like that, lyrically. All the sh*t he writes is taken from his daily life, his work life, his wife and kids - its really mundane stuff he is able to convey in a non-mundane way. I think thats a real gift. People and places and things in Zappas life became characters. Like Billy the Mountain theres like a whole thing about that, and theres a whole other thing about Gregory Peck being used for Gregory Peckery - it has to do with a movie he was watching on late night television. Burnt Weenie Sandwich is something from his diet. I guess this is a long answer that says I dont think he gave much thought to the politics; I think he was just writing music and he needed lyrical material and he picked it right out of his life. After the whole Mothers of Prevention thing, the lyrical content of his songs became a lot more politically scathing. VH1: Yeah, it was very fierce at the end. Fishman: Very fierce and very naming names. Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell were regular players in his stuff. Theres whole section in his book about Robert Tilton. It's funny. I used to watch that guy on TV all the time. I was on his mailing list as a goof. I wanted him to mail all his prayer stuff, just to drain him of a dollar a year in postage - it'd be worth it. I never sent him a penny. All this sh*t would come to my house and Id hang it on my walls. I was so disgusted with him and I thought Zappa wouldve had a heyday with lyrics if he had gotten on that guys mailing list. I remember Tilton being mentioned in The Real Frank Zappa Book, I was just dying because it was so true and I think that after the PMRC episode, all those people became players in his daily life and so they showed up in his music. VH1: He always had the cultural scrutiny, though. Early on it was America Drinks Up and Goes Home and The Idiot Bastard Son - stuff like that. Fishman: As far as the sociopolitical aspect of what he did, it was like real heavy in the beginning and real heavy at the end. VH1: True. I never thought of it that way. Youre right. Fishman: In the middle he was mired in music and musicians and bands. To me, his earlier music was kind of typical of a younger person's outlook. When you're young you start to become aware that the adults around you arent necessarily any more together than you are, and there are things in society that are really messed up. That's what he was writing really early on. Matt Groening wrote a thing about Zappa saying when he got Freak Out it was like his savior. "Drop out of school before it rots your brain and all that... Even in his bathroom humor phase, his intellect came across. You could tell that he wasnt just some mindless guy trying to impress the girls; he was sincerely about the music. I think that he earned a lot of respect from people who were willing to think apart from the herd. VH1: What Zappa discs do you travel with? Fishman: Actually, I dont have any with me on this tour [with Pork Tornado]. At home I go through different phases. Im just working my way through the catalog now. VH1: Is it far fetched to think that youre celebrating a Zappa sense of humor in Pork Tornado's Kiss My Black Ass? Fishman: No, youre probably right. I think he certainly blazed the path to make that kind of tune something do-able. That guy's influence is part of my metabolism on all levels - sociopolitical views as well as musical ideas. I dont know which actually has a stronger affect on me, but I definitely think that he was one of the guys that blazed the path to make a thing like Kiss My Black Ass relevant in the world, to make it a useful idea. I didnt write the song - it was written 20 years ago by the guitar player in the band. But Dan [Archer] is 47 years old and he was into Zappa from early on& VH1: Before you go, name a couple other great wits in rock. Who else makes you laugh out loud? Fishman: Oddly enough somebody whos been making me laugh out loud in the last couple years is Billy Joel. Ive read some funny quotes from that guy and I just have a feeling that he is just a very funny man. There was this one thing from him where he was talking about his rehab, and people were giving him shi*t about it and he was like Well, dont people understand that rehab for a musician is like going to the dentist for a normal person? Dont these people watch VH1s Behind the Music?" I thought that was the funniest thing; I just liked his "don't judge me" attitude. But as far as like wit and the humor go, I cant think of anyone that was in the neighborhood of Zappa. I think he really stands alone. Can you think of anyone? VH1: Well, you know punk there were plenty of good funny lines in punk. Like Black Flag had plenty of good funny lines. Fishman: I wasnt into Black Flag. I dont buy Henry Rollins at all. But Ill tell you, Jello Biafra, hes a different story& and he shows up in Zappas book, too. Trying to prove that the Christian right was behind the Oliver North thing. Funny stuff. |
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