Bob Marshall: A "United Mutation"? The collective consensus? I'm reminded of the saying, "Advertising creates the disease and then offers the cure".

Frank Zappa: Well, that's just like the way sell you pornography legislation.

Bob Marshall: And the drug thing. So, this is an elaboration what you mean to say, "The Emperor isn't wearing any clothes".

Frank Zappa: That's right.

Bob Marshall: These subconscious factors wouldn't work if one knew that the Emperor was wearing no clothes.

Frank Zappa: Here's a way to make it obvious. It's just like the PMRC talking about explicit lyrics and harming children. If a kid doesn't know what a blowjob is, you can talk about blowjobs for weeks and he isn't going to be affected in any way about that. Unless he knows what you're talking about, how's the lyric going to register? It's the same way if you're using the word "parsec" too many times in a sentence. Unless the person knows what it refers to, where's the harm? What good is the data?

Bob Marshall: Don't they feel that the kids know too soon, now?

Frank Zappa: When is "too soon"? There's a certain mentality that presumes that sex must be something truly horrible, and that we must be protected from it at all costs, especially our tender, precious, young children. And there is a difference between knowing about sex, knowing how it functions and having, let's say, in the case of child pornography, an adult abusing a child. That is a violent crime. It has more to do with violence than it has to do with sex.

Bob Marshall: Sex is a means of controlling people, but it also is a very important thing, and a lot of emotions come out of sex.

Frank Zappa: The way a right wing administration would view sex is: "Sex isa cheap thrill. Now, we can't have these people having too many thrills because usually after they have sex, they're happy. Unless they're really doing it wrong, they had a good time. Now, that relieves the dread". If you just had good sex, you're not going to sit around there and think about that dread they tried to instill in you. That's one of the antidotes to the dread factor. So, the less sex, the more dread, the more dread, the more sales, the more sales, the more GNP. Then you have what they call this "prosperity which we must continue for another administration". The other thing that happens, when you deny people sex, is they have a force inside their body that wants to be expressed, it wants to come out. You're either going to do it through sex or you're going to do it through murder. You're going to find some way to get that out of you. Now, these right-wing guys would prefer you had a nation of potential murderers because that makes for a great army. Whereas you don't want a nation of people who do good sex because what have you got then? They're having a good time. You can't sell them that Wacky Wallwalker if they're in a good mood.

Bob Marshall: But what about sexual hygiene? In other words, you could have good sex with one partner, but people get confused. They think that they want to have sex with more than one person. They get more greedy, then the hygenic problem comes in.

Frank Zappa: Come on, that's a matter of sex education. Someone ought to tell you to wash you're private parts every once in a while.

Bob Marshall: Yeah, but people are stupid.

Frank Zappa: We, the American people are not physically incapable of being taught how to wash their private parts, or why. I think we have the ability to process this particular piece of information. So, the hygiene question - I don't know, people are not that stupid.

Bob Marshall: But you know people are stupid on many levels, and the people who are protective babysitters in religion and government, so to speak, they take advantage of the stupidity to control, but people are generally inconsiderate. So, there would be this chaotic transition period, which is maybe what we're in now, where people are not following the leader's positions, or there's a mood of autonomy, and yet they create a lot of mistakes from it and bad side-effects because they don't know how to be intelligent.

Frank Zappa: That's a big problem - where people don't know how to be intelligent. One of the reasons that they don't know is because it's never been fashionable to be intelligent, especially in the United States. This country has an anti- intellectual history that goes back to the first bundling board. You know, thinking is bad for you. AS a matter of fact, you can trace it back to the beginning of Christian doctrine. The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? O.K., it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that". Let's get one thing straight. Besides the Universe being just a matter of rates, and I don't want to get back into that, but the behaviour of molecules is a matter of rates. And molecules, translated into the real world where we can deal with it on a regular basis, move into the realm of chemistry, and so it is with intelligence. I think it has a lot to do with chemical processes that take place in your brain. I think you can make people artificially stupid. Quaaludes is a good example. It's a chemical way of producing stupid behaviour, and conversely, there must be a way chemically to make people perform better. I don't know what it is. But if there are chemical substances which people will willingly ingest to produce stupid behaviour, one day somebody will come up with something that will make it possible for you to think better. I'm not talking about LSD, but some other way that'll just allow you to improve your processing capabilities. Just like when we were talking about the difference between the original Apple computer, where you have to wait ten minutes for the thing to go clonk, clonk and see a few words on the screen, and stuff that is available on the marketplace now that is a thousand times faster. It's doing the same job. It's just doing it in a more efficient way. So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity.

Bob Marshall: Earlier, just before you were talking about the Tree of Knowledge, you were speaking about having some chemical means of making people smarter. I think of the...

Frank Zappa: Maybe it's an apple.

Bob Marshall: Yeah, the Apple computer. The text of the booklet in UNCLE MEAT, back in '69, was about taking Ruben and the Jets and the "vocal drone mechanism", and using sounds that made vegetables grow better, and animals. Were you getting metaphorically at what you were just talking about - your vision of seeing that we could be optimistic because someday they're going to make people better, maybe with sound?

Frank Zappa: Why not with sound? Because the largest organ in the human body, correct me if I'm wrong, is your skin, and your eardrum is only part of your skin, folks. So, that may be the most sensitive part of the skin. But I believe the whole skin responds to sound, and different parts of the skin over different parts of the body have different resonant frequencies. In other words, frequencies that strike them better. Because of the size of the eardrum, it has a centre frequency susceptibility at around 2K. That's why telephones sound like telephones. Your ear is most sensitive around 2 kilohertz. It can hear other things, but that's the real sensitive range. So, maybe other larger patches of skin resonate with other different frequencies. There's been research done that showed that certain frequencies of certain amplitudes produce physical effects. Ten cycles of a certain amplitude stops your heart. You can die from sound. You wouldn't even "hear" the ten cycles, in the traditional sense of the word, because your ear doesn't go down that low, but a couple of good boops and you're dead. And there are frequencies that will make you piss, and frequencies that will make you shit, and frequencies that will make you do all kinds of things. I don't think they've discerned the entire range of them, but there is a connection between human organism and the way moving air molecules affect that organism. So, we shouldn't be so short-sighted as to rule out the possibility that therapies for different kinds of conditions, as well as the ability to kill people, could all be induced by sound. And the clue to that might be the soothing effect that certain types of music have on certain individuals. And the trick is, what passes for nice music in one culture, is radically different than nice music in another culture. I doubt seriously that most Americans would find it soothing to listen to six hours of Chinese music, but I don't think that the Chinese would find it too soothing to listen to six hours of Barry Manilow, either. So, each culture has a different ideal of what constitutes good music. But the thing that is existing in music, that transcends the style, the orchestration, or the timbre of the music, is the pitches of the notes. So that may be the determining factor.

Bob Marshall: Yeah, that's interesting. There is an idea that Marshall McLuhan tossed around - that music was speech slowed down. And he said that the reason cultures have different musical tastes is intimately connected to language. So, obviously the rhythms of Chinese music are connected to the way they speak, and that determines a large part of...

Frank Zappa: It's not the rhythm. The thing that sets the Chinese music apart, the rhythms of Chinese music are similar to the rhythms of the other musics, is the timbre of it. It's the texture of the thing.

Bob Marshall: Oh, this is what you mean by "pitch".

Frank Zappa: No, timbre is the texture of a sound quality. In other words, is it being played by a snare drum? Is it being played by an oboe? Is it being played by a tuba? That's the timbre. The pitch is the vibrational frequency of the note being played no matter what instrument is playing it. That's pitch. Rhythm is the rate, the period, the distance between one note and another. That constitues the rhythm. And the harmony is - there's an implied or explicit harmonic domain in which all the action takes place. It's like the canvas on which everything happens. The same melody line, with a major chord supporting it, is a different story when a minor chord is supporting it. The message that comes through is different. So, that's how the things interact. Harmony tells you how to perceive the melody. That's the compass that shows you which way North is. The rhythm determines how fast the piece is going. So, you can determine whether or not the piece is above your factory rate. Or the rhythm determines the distance, the periodicity between one start time and another of each of the pitches in the melody line. That's how it's interacting. And the timbre is going to send your message about certain other qualities of the line. For example, the dumbest example of all time is: "Purple Haze" played on an accordion is a different story than "Purple Haze" on a fuzztone guitar. You play exactly the same notes, but there's two different messages. So, one of the main differences, culturally, from place to place, in the music, is in the timbre of the instruments which are playing the music. Chinese music, to use an extreme example, has certain types of flues, certain types of little, stringed instruments, and little, bowed instruments that have a certain nasal quality to them which would not be an admired texture in a Western society. But to the Chinese that is their music and it's perfect, and it's wonderful, and they think that's the way things ought to be. Whereas we in America think that Bruce Springsteen is the next best thing to Michael Jackson.

Bob Marshall: When I said rhythm before I would include all those factors, but did you say earlier that pitch may be the key for making people intelligent through sound?

Frank Zappa: No, I'm not saying "making people intelligent". I'm saying if we allow ourselves to consider the possibility of audio being used as a tool for therapy, really what you are doing is using certain frequencies aimed at certain parts of the body in order to set up a resonance. In other words, you can knock down a bridge with the right resonance because you'll find a resonant frequency of the concrete that's holding it up, and it's going to crack. And the same thing could be true of a crystalline situation in the human body. If you want to crack it, you've got to find the resonant frequency of that crystal, and then it's gone. Like the right note could be a cure for gout where you have uric acid crystals located in the joint someplace. How are you going to get in there? The guy can't move his joint anymore because the crystals have kept his joint from moving. So, you find the right frequency, aim it at it, turn up the volume, and they're gone.

Bob Marshall: I'm sure some people have explored this. Do you know, Carolyn?

Carolyn Dean: Yeah, that's Radionics.

Frank Zappa: Yeah?

Carolyn Dean: Yeah, there are different things. Medically, there are gallstone-shattering devices with ultrasound.

Frank Zappa: Oh yeah.

Carolyn Dean: But there are Radionics machines that measure the frequencies of all the organs. If the frequency is not normal, you can plug in the normal frequency and "kick" it. So that's being done.

Frank Zappa: Well, see?

Bob Marshall: I remember, according to Miles, that you used to have on your basement studio door the words "Dr. Zurkon", back in 1970.

Frank Zappa: It's possible, yeah.

Bob Marshall: Because there I see you incorporating several roles. Your talking about healing that was brought out on the UNCLE MEAT album. You touched on it, and it doesn't show up too much in other records. But this relates to something you said at the end of the Rolling Stone interview in 1968. I think they asked you, "Anything more to say?", and you brought up this: If one is being tried, you should be tried by your peer group. In other words, you addressed the legal world then, and you're addressing the medical world here. Do you see that you're using music in many roles other than just as a specialist of music?

Frank Zappa: Well, I think you're blowing it out of proportion. The fact is that I"m a guy who has an operating brain. I"m in the process constantly of bringing in data, and sorting it, and drawing conclusions. You do an interview with me, I deliver to you today's conclusions. If you happen to ask the right question about something that I"ve thought about, I'll give you what my up-to-the-minute take is on any given conclusion on any given topic at that point. To me, it's fun. It's not like I have a mission to go out and help the medical profession or the legal profession. I think about different things. And the reason why I would be triggered to think about the thing would be that I might see a news story, or somebody might say something , and it doesn't just go by me. I think about it. I think about my environment. So, I don't have any choice, that's just the way I am. I can't turn it off. So, if I come up with a conclusion, and somebody asks me a question about certain topics, then I'm going to give you my conclusion rather than text book knowledge. I didn't learn my shit from reading a book. I would have gone to college, I couldn't have done any better.

Bob Marshall: Yeah. So, where I'm maybe a bit limited here is trying to project a certain strategy of the theatrical element.

Frank Zappa: Well, let me talk about that peer group business, because when you talk about what the Constitution provides, a trial by a jury of your peers, I would say that would be one of the most precious commodities that a person can obtain in the United States today. Because the people who are available to sit on a jury anymore are not peers of anyone. How do you get a fair trial, and especially if complicated technical matters, when your peers are not your peers? Who's Ivan Boesky's peers? What do they do?

Bob Marshall: David Rockefeller.

Frank Zappa: Yeah. In theory, for him to get a fair trial, he would have had to have a jury of his peers. Where are they? And even more grotesque, where are Charles Manson's peers?

Bob Marshall: Then it doesn't make sense, the idea of being tried by your peers.

Frank Zappa: On the one hand, if you want to stick to what the Constitution says and treat it with some respect, and at least go along with the idea of democracy, then you ought to live by the letter of the law. If you find out the law is no good, then you ought to change the goddamn thing, or live a lie.

Bob Marshall: One of the problems in Canada is that the medical profession keeps the trial by their peers "in house".

Frank Zappa: But that happens everywhere though. It's very seldom that a guy who is in the medical profession in the United States really gets into a civil court because there's other ways to hush up his case through the AMA. And the AMA is certainly nothing to brag about. They got caught with th that little scam that they tried to pull against the chiropractors recently. Look, nobody's perfect. People have invented certain rules to attempt to give the illusion the world works. Some of the rules are good, some of them are not. The biggest problem that we have in American government today is when a problem is realized, and they are popping up every day. We're just beginning to see the start of this legacy of the Industrial Revolution which is the ruination of health and ecology on a global scale. That's the price you're going to pay for all the evil shit that happened at the beginning of the century. Now as the stuff comes up, instead of dealing with it in practical ways, there are attempts made to legislate the event away, legislate the problem. The trick about legislation is no matter how you write the law, you've got to enforce it. And I'll be kind, ninety percent of the laws that have been passed recently in the U.S. Congress are unenforceable. They're either unenforceable, from a practical standpoint, because it can't be done, or unenforceable because it might be done but nobody in his right mind would be willing to spend the money to actually make the enforcement possible. And the new drug bill is one of those things. You can't really enforce it. There's not enough police, there's not enough jails, there's not enough courts, there's not enough judges, juries, anything to implement what's written in that bill. And the same holds true of just about everything else that comes out of Congress. We would be better off in this country if we would spend four years, one whole admini- stration, ridding ourselves of useless laws that don't work.

Bob Marshall: And lawyers. That's where you get...

Frank Zappa: That's right. That's the problem. These laws exist to create work for lawyers. The contemporary society has gotten so complicated that you could be violating a law without even knowing it. That's the whole idea of JOE'S GARAGE - the criminalization of America. You are still responsible for your actions. You can still be called a criminal even if you didn't know that the law was there. So, who can know? There is no one person in the United States right now who will stand up and swear that he understands the U.S. tax code. It's too complicated, and if you take that on a state-by-state basis and think of the body of law that exists on the books in every state in the U.S., compounded by federal law, compounded by case law, then you are totally at the mercy of a legal system that could perhaps even have you killed for violating something you didn't even know existed. I believe there are still some states that have the death penalty for oral copulation - New Jersey, North Dakota.