Bob Marshall: I remember there was a quote back about 1970: "Someone is getting off on this beyond his or her wildest comprehensions"

Frank Zappa: I've had letters from people saying, "It was me! It was me!"

Bob Marshall: I think I claimed that to you in 1985 myself

Frank Zappa: "Look at my head! The top of my head is gone! It was me! I can prove it!"

Bob Marshall: "I'm dead!" (both laughing). What did you think you meant in targeting that or was that just a general principle?

Frank Zappa: You have to have an average of what is going on out there and when you opt to do the thing that is going to whiz over most people's heads, you know that there's going to be a certain percentage in there that will be tall enough where it's going to get them right in the middle of their head.

Bob Marshall: That's targeting.

Frank Zappa: Yeah, that's the targeting. You see, I don't know too many of those kinds of people who really get it all. That would be the truly rare individual. Because in order for them to get it all they have to know what I know. Which means, not that I'm so smart, but I've had experiences that they haven't had just because people are unique. So, nobody gets 100% but if anybody ever got 60%, they'd be in big trouble.

Bob Marshall: "Big trouble"? Is that a facetious remark?

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: I think it was on HOT RATS that you said: "This is a movie for your ears". Do you remember that phrase.

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: A rather intelligent critic at that time, not known by many people, described your work up to that point as "a visualization of a kaleidoscope of textures". If one juxtaposes the word "visualization" with your early statement that your work "incorporates any available visual medium, consciousness, of all participants (including audience", which we've talked about, "all perceptual deficiencies", and a few other points, why do you say "any available visual medium" Since most people would think of you as a musician.

Frank Zappa: That's only because they don't know what I can do in the other medium. I've always been able to manipulate pictures since I first got hold of a pencil and paper. I started off drawing before I could...

Bob Marshall: Before you had music in your head?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, and there was no music in our household when I was a kid. I came to it late, but I've always been interested in the way in which pictures work with music and the problem about doing more of it is that a visual medium is a far more expensive medium that the audio medium. An independent guy can afford to make an album easier than he can afford to make a movie, or then he can afford to make a video, and have some quality in it. So there's only occasionally that i can scrape up enough money to do a project that involves pictures and music. So that part of my work is less known than the records that I have out and that's one of the reasons for putting Honker Home Video together because at least with that company, some of the things that I've done working with visual stuff can be gotten out to the public.

Bob Marshall: But with the phrase "movie for your ears", you emphasize the visual. Is the "conceptual continuity" a movie?

Frank Zappa: No, because in order to make it complete, you have to involve what you see. It's a total sensory thing.

Bob Marshall: Is that your definition of music? It includes all senses?

Frank Zappa: If you get to the other definition of music that I use when I'm working on my stuff, it means the organization of any data.

Bob Marshall: Visual, acoustic, smells...

Frank Zappa: Yeah, choreography, anything, any data. So long as you say to yourself, "I'm now making a musical composition of this stuff", the composition can include stuff that's living in this ashtray, whatever it is. So long as you willfully organize it into that object that you're making. That's the criteria that I would use.

Bob Marshall: That would be a criterion that's modern, a product of television because television uses all data. I always thought it was interesting that you had yourself in a TV screen on FREAK OUT! The cover image has always struck me as a colour TV image, the colouring...

Frank Zappa: Oh yeah. Well, that's not what the intent was, but go on.

Bob Marshall: You had the lines, it looked like a damaged colour TV (laughs), the colouring. But you did not intend that?

Frank Zappa: No.

Bob Marshall: O.K., I projected that anyway. But I find it interesting. I don't think earlier composers would talk about using all data in the way you're doing unless there have been... you can correct me.

Frank Zappa: As far as I know, I don't think there's anybody that has worked in contemporary composition that has the familiarity with the technical side that I do. I'm not talking about electronic music composers. I'm talking about just a general knowledge of all different...

Bob Marshall: Media?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, just every tool that you can use. If I can't get in with a soldering iron and fix it or build it, I certainly know how to use it and what some uses might be of the tool that the guy who invented it never imagined. One of my specialties is taking existing off-the-shelf stuff and twisting it to do something that the guy who manufactured it never thought it would be used for. That's a hobby.

Bob Marshall: Weren't you asked to name the band "Mothers of Invention"? You were asked to add on "of Invention"?

Frank Zappa: Yeah. Well, we were just told we couldn't use the name "Mothers".

Bob Marshall: So you suggested "Mothers of Invention".

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: But that was an accurate statement of your talents - to be able to work with many technologies. Were you aware of that at the time?

Frank Zappa: That wasn't the reason for sticking it on there. It was just a practical decision that had to be made at the time of the FREAK OUT! album because they were refusing to release the album. It was so stupid. You can imagine the A&R department at Verve Records saying, "We can't release this record because no disc jockey will play a song by 'The Mothers' on the radio". Well, no disc jockey would play the content of the record no matter what the name of the group was. You could have called it "The Smelts" or something, they still wouldn't have played it. But that's the way it was. People were just afraid. I guess they're still afraid.

Bob Marshall: I'm going to move into your role as a symbolist. Do you know the Symbolist group in art history?

Frank Zappa: No, I'm not familiar with Art history. Tell me about it.

Bob Marshall: Well, the Symbolists broke up normal images and reformed them, juxtaposed them.

Frank Zappa: Is this based on Jung?

Bob Marshall: No, this was before him. This was a hundred years ago with poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Literary historians grouped them into this movement called the Symbolists. There was a man who wrote a book at the turn of this century called "The Symbolist Movement in Literature". He tagged that name on them, but it was the emphasis on a symbol as the primary focus or motif in one's art.

Frank Zappa: Well, I suppose I belong in there. Anybody who has said as much as I have about poodles ought to have some sort of a recommendation in that group. But it wasn't because I decided to join a movement.

Bob Marshall: Maybe there are historical forces, ways of thinking that you tapped into and continued a tradition unconsciously. I mean, from the critic's point of view. I think it was Miles who was the first one who wrote about your repetition of motifs in his early articles in the late Sixties. I remember one of his questions from International Times where he asked "Is there an IDEA behind your work?". It was capitalized in the newspaper. And I think that's what I'm trying to get at.

Frank Zappa: That's simple. It's that the Emperor's not wearing any clothes, never has, never will.

Bob Marshall: What is the Emperor?

Frank Zappa: Fill in the blank. (laughs)

Bob Marshall: So the idea is that you're making a symbol that allows other people to participate in it.

Frank Zappa: That's audience participation on a grand scale. It's like name your poison. Why, that's almost elegant.

Bob Marshall: What is?

Frank Zappa: Structuring something the way that people get to participate in it by adding their missing ingredient. It's like, be your own catalyst.

Bob Marshall: That is a tradition that T.S. Eliot, Joyce and Pound articulated. When people asked Eliot the meaning of the poem, he would shrug his shoulders, and then they would give what they thought it meant and...

Frank Zappa: He would say they're right.

Bob Marshall: Yes, Eliot would say, "You're right".

Frank Zappa: Well you see, I didn't have that kind of an education. I have no knowledge of the history of art or poetry, or any of that kind of stuff. It never interested me. I think that it's nice that it's there for people who want it, but I never studied it. I don't know anything about that. I just did my own stuff. If it happens to be similar to other things that other people have done, fine. I can't help that. But it's not like I went to college to learn about all these people who did bitchin' stuff through the years and decided to go out and do that. That is not interesting to me. All I can say is, "Yeah, they're doing it right".

Bob Marshall: You would agree with that method. You don't know why you wanted to create in that method. Is it because you wanted to say, "I'm a nice guy. I'll include you". Is there a democratic impulse there?

Frank Zappa: No. I think the jury's still out on democracy as a...

Bob Marshall: Viable institution?

Frank Zappa: That's right. You know, I keep referring back to the book that I had when I was in high school in our civics class. It was called "Democracy: The American Experiment" and...

Bob Marshall: We're still studying...

Frank Zappa: I think we're still experimenting and right now it looks like some of the ingredients they put in don't really work.

Bob Marshall: People might ask, "Why the dog image?"

Frank Zappa: I don't even know how that got started. There are certain absurd things about a poodle as a species unto itself. What especially women have decided to do to poodles is probably something that if there were a big guy on the cloud who meted out punishment at the time of your demise, that there would be a lot of women that would be tortured forever in the Lake of Fire for things that they have decided to inflict on poodles. So, that's a pretty good metaphor there if you really think about...

Bob Marshall: For perverse creativity?

Frank Zappa: No. Look, a poodle is born. It's got hair evenly distributed all over its small, piquant, canine-type body. Figure it out. They don't start looking weird until some woman decides that she wants to shape all that stuff to make it look like a walking shrubbery. Now, that tells you two things: that the dog's co-operative and that the woman's got some problems.

Bob Marshall: The "mother of invention" has some problems. She's inventing.

Frank Zappa: Yeah, but did she invent something good? Do you think a partially denuded, small animal is good?

Bob Marshall: It seems some people like it, so we have to allow them to have that choice or enjoyment.

Frank Zappa: Yeah, but doesn't the poodle have some rights here? I mean, we're trying to save the whales. They're stuck up there. There are three whales with their noses sticking out of a hole. Now the Russians want to send an ice-breaker. It's three hundred miles away, the Russians are going to save the whales. What about the poodles? Who's doing anything for the poodles?

Bob Marshall: Right, save the poodles?

Carolyn Dean: Who's plucking the poodles?

Frank Zappa: What?

Bob Marshall: Who's plucking the poodles? Who's plooking? Who's plucking? (all laughing). To me that's a symbol of your journalistic work of putting out information for Americans who are getting plooked and need to be...

Frank Zappa: Unplooked?

Bob Marshall: Yeah.

Frank Zappa: I think they do need to be unplooked, but the problem with Americans is they have this self-image of "We're so nice, we're so fair, we're so honest, we always take the high road." If only it were true, this would be heaven on earth, but it's not true. And when you see two hundred and forty million people willingly deluding themselves with this idea that they're somehow God's chosen people, I find that to be a huge... Continental bad mental health is what it is.

Bob Marshall: That's the "cheese" that you talked about in your Newsweek "editorial" they wouldn't print?

Frank Zappa: Yeah. How can we be so foolish as to think that we've got it all? We certainly don't. And anybody who ever travelled for twenty minutes and kept his eyes open must realize that no country has got everything. You just don't have it. The major deficiency in the United States seems to be that it's got a history that only goes back a couple of hundred years and that history itself is riddled with corruption, it is riddled with exploitation. You name it, we have exploited it and it's not exactly something to be proud of. If whatever we have achieved we had come by it honestly we'd be in a lot better shape, but really we haven't. We've abused a lot of people not only here in our own country but around the world, and then gone to church to smooth it over and had some guy say, "Yes, we're God's chosen people and this is our Manifest Destiny - to be the peacekeepers for the world". I wonder, with this aesthetic that they have in the United States, whether we don't have the right to inflict in on anybody else. I believe that we certainly don't have the right to inflict it. But even if we had the right, would that other person benefit from becoming more like us? Countries that have cultures that go back thousands and thousands of years, and we walk in and we want to give them Coca Cola. Why?

Bob Marshall: You're speaking as an American Citizen. There would probably many people in other countries who feel that their fellow citizens are a bit deluded, too patriotic about their cultural values. So you're speaking as an American citizen.

Frank Zappa: Well, I think that the American situation is probably more critical than, say, the guy from Borneo who believes that we are where it's at. At least the guy from Borneo isn't going around doing some tricks in Central America and wherever else we've got little covert operations going on. He's not trying to inflict his values on another society. Whereas, especially through the missionary procedure coming out from the United States, we have spread the poison of our ignorance to other cultures, to the detriment of those cultures, almost since this place was founded. America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here, abuse the Indians, and then go to bed with a board down the middle, you know, the bundling board, so they don't have sex. That's how we got started. And when we think back to our Founding Fathers, they don't ever talk about the Founding Mothers. It might be a little bit too risque. They didn't want to have too much to do with them, anyway. Because what kind of a woman wants to take a ride on a wooden boat in the middle of winter, anyway? Not probably something you want to see in Playboy magazine. The way we got started and what we have turned into, and our desire to inflict it on other people all over the world, I think is a tragedy. And something big is going to happen in 1992 when Europe, if they can get their act together, if they can organize themselves the way that they are trying to do and kind of be the United States of Europe, as a consumer bloc and as a manufacturing bloc, is going to be larger than the United States. That's three hundred and thirty million people or something like that, that make products that work.

Bob Marshall: Yes, and that is the impetus for "free trade". I think the Canadian businessmen know that they've got to get together with the United States to compete with this bloc that's coming up.

Frank Zappa: Well, here's the thing. What they make in Europe, those products seem to be more desirable than the products that are made elsewhere, except for Japan. Japan, as we all know, makes stuff that everybody wants.

Bob Marshall: You mean now, on the world market, Europe's products are very desirable?

Frank Zappa: Yeah. And if the United States continues the way it's going, like thriving on rhetoric rather than on practical solutions, in four years when they've got their United States of Europe, we will have slid even further. And the United States is going to be in a very vulnerable position, even if it makes an alliance with Canada in order to make a large bloc, because the size of the bloc doesn't increase the quality of your product. It just means more people sharing the absence of trade barriers to buy more stuff from someplace else. Right now the United States is two hundred and forty million people dumb enough to buy anything that anybody sells them and smart enough not to buy their own stuff, O.K. And that is not something that you can continue for a century. You can't go for a hundred years just buying everybody else's stuff. Sooner or later you're going to have to redevelop the product base in the United States so that we buy our own stuff and that our commodities become valuable to people elsewhere. This trade imbalance is not a joke. It has long-range implications that could be very severe. And for every American that dreams of the American way of life and owning your own little home with the white picket fence and living next door to somebody who looks like Jimmy Stewart, they ain't going to get it.