Bob Marshall: What are the "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution"? Because it seems these old institutions are running amuck with these old techniques, and they're out of control. They clash with different media, different institutions, and different professions.

Frank Zappa: The funny thing about that song title is that, at the time that it was put on UNCLE MEAT, there was no such thing as a concern over industrial pollution. It hadn't even been brought up as a topic. I put that on that song just as a joke after driving through New Jersey.

Bob Marshall: So, there were not nine, you had not categorized...

Frank Zappa: Here I could see nine on that one trip. There may be more.

Bob Marshall: The term was not in the regular media...

Frank Zappa: No.

Bob Marshall: But one of the institutes involved in the C.I.A.'s MKULTRA mind-control program, and this was in '55, was called the Human Ecology Society. They were using the term "ecology", but it was "human" ecology - perhaps in a management sense, not as pollution.

Frank Zappa: Human engineering.

Bob Marshall: Yeah. But I don't know if I got that clearly. Do you want peer group trial? Or are you pointing out that there are no peer groups possible?

Frank Zappa: I'm pointing out an idiosyncrasy of the law. You want it, make it work. If it won't work, then you're living a lie if you keep it on the books. And that's only one.

Bob Marshall: It would be useful to respond to your demand and change, but there's an element in your suggestion of the absurdity of the situation, right?

Frank Zappa: Of course. You have to look at the situation and see what's really going on here. You have thwarted ideal, you have somebody designing an ideal situation. And through history you see that it doesn't work and then, instead of dealing with it because it doesn't work, you have people living a lie. And living a lie creates stress.

Bob Marshall: And humour. Pointing it out creates laughter which helps relieve stress so...

Frank Zappa: Yeah, but it doesn't solve the problem. It's like popping a pimple.

Bob Marshall: But this is like the human intelligence factor we were talking about. There's a catch-22 element here. You're pointing out the lie. Do you expect people to be able to apply the suggestion, or would you ask them to do it?

Frank Zappa: What I'm asking people to do is simply this: In your own way, in your own life, every day, you are confronted with a piece of data. Don't just eat it up. Just think about it for a minute. You have the right to process your own information based on the equipment that you were born with. That's your right. That's real freedom. You have the right to make up your own mind. Now, if you choose to numb yourself, and to be bamboozled, you have the right to be bamboozled. But in your state of bamboozlement, you do not have the right to be a liability, because of your self-imposed ignorance, on other people who might want to do things the right way. If you voluntarily choose to be a numbskull, for whatever reason you have chosen it, that's fine. You have the right to be stupid, but you don't have the right to harm other people as a result of your stupidity. And you don't have the right to legislated your stupidity into existence, to force it on other people who have a clearer view of what things are.

Bob Marshall: Do you think that one man, a President with a wise cabinet, could implement some changes, or is the society so complex that that institution, within the checks and balances system, would not be able to implement change?

Frank Zappa: I think it's possible, sure. The reason that it's possible is nobody has more access to the media than the President. And most of the evils of society can, in fact, be cured through information. We have a society that has been disinformed and based on the disinformation has made irrational choices. And that's what I mean by "ignorance". People, who ordinarily might be smart, are deprived of the data by which to make a rational decision, don't have the data to do it. Nobody has got more control, or access to the media, than the White House Press Office. We've seen it. They've literally reshaped American history to their own ends. It truly is 1984: "Black is white, white is black, 2 and 2 is eleven", whatever they want to tell you. "George Bush is an ecology guy. Ronald Reagan is a great patriot. Nancy wants you to say no to drugs, and she likes to say yes to the extra clothes that come in"

Bob Marshall: See the power of the information of the situation we're in? And your mini-manifesto, which we talked about at the beginning, begins with the work "Information".

Frank Zappa: That's right, you have to be suspicious of the information. That's why it says, "Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom".

Bob Marshall: What is "Information"

Frank Zappa: Any data that comes in. Somebody presents you with something. Like, I walk up to you and say, "Two and two is eleven". That's some information. It's bad information, but it's information. O.K. Now, if somebody comes up to you and says "Two and two is eleven", and they have the Presidential Seal on their coat, and they got bunting waving in the background, and balloons go up, you might consider it for a minute. So, that's information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is the point at which you know something, O.K. Now, wisdom is the idea that you have a bank of facts. To behave wisely, you have to deploy those facts in some way. You can deploy them stupidly or you can deploy them wisely. So, information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. You can take all the sorted pieces of information which gives you a knowledge base. You can act in what you believe is a wise procedure, but that is not necessarily any ultimate truth. And just because something is an ultimate truth doesn't mean it's beautiful. And just because something is beautiful certainly doesn't mean you have to love it. Because there's lots of ugly stuff that you could love, too. I mean, I love my dog. Not a particularly attractive dog, but that's a wonderful dog.

Bob Marshall: How did it continue after Beauty? What are the rest of the lines?

Frank Zappa: Oh, well, it's: "Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty, Beauty is not love, and Love is not music. Music is THE BEST"

Bob Marshall: If "Love is not music", what is "Love"?

Frank Zappa: It's chemical, merely chemical.

Bob Marshall: And it can be...

Frank Zappa: Chocolate induced.

Bob Marshall: And you have different rates of duration?

Frank Zappa: It can have different frequencies. There are many notes that you could call B flat. There are several of them on the piano. They're all called B flat, but they're all different rates. But they're still called B flat for some reason. Because they're multiples of the same rate.

Bob Marshall: It seems that in your studies in music, in your experience as a musician, you've seen that as a model for many other parts of human activity. And it serves to see music as chemistry, and you can take the smattering of chemical knowledge you got in high school and you adapt it to the musical metaphor, to the Big Note metaphor.

Frank Zappa: Well, things work together. I see the Universe as an interrelated thing, not so much as one big enormously complicated thing, but one big simple motherfucker. It's rates. There it is.

Bob Marshall: There was a quote in an obscure fashion magazine about 1970 where you said, "Waves come together, they cancel each other out, the there's no time". Something along those lines, if I recall correctly.

Frank Zappa: I don't remember saying it, but I know what I'm talking about. Alright, there is such a thing as frequency cancellation. I don't think you can ever get it to be a hundred percent, but you can reduce the amplitude, how loud something is, by causing the waves to cancel each other out. That's one of the ways that they use to reduce the hum in air conditioning. By introducing a tone into the air conditioning duct, which counteracts the low frequency hum, the waves cancel each other out. Now, if waves are time and you cancel the wave, then what have you just done?

Bob Marshall: We've covered a lot of things that I wanted to talk about. Now, here are some miscellaneous topics. I noticed in various interviews that the phrase "no comment" would come up. And in one of them, back in '76, in some rock magazine, you were asked about psychic phenomena, being psychic. You answered, "No comment". Is there a reason why you would say "no comment"?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, because that's based usually on the person I'm talking to.

Bob Marshall: You mean, you don't think there is information that you would give in response to that question?

Frank Zappa: Sometimes there are certain people who can't understand what you're saying.

Bob Marshall: So, "no comment" means it's a reflection on the person you're dealing with.

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: And I noticed in other interviews, this may be the same reason, when someone starts talking about '50's R&B, you'll say, "Now, you're moving into dangerous territory there".

Frank Zappa: One of the reasons for it is, most of the people who talk about '50's R&B don't have any recollection of it. If you're talking to somebody who wasn't alive during the Fifties, then all they know about '50's R&B is the Sha Na Na television show, or Happy Days. They don't know what it was so I would rather not discuss it with them. If I can talk to somebody in my own age bracket who knows what the thing is, then fine. But you can't really have a conversation about that style of music with anybody who doesn't comprehend it because of the damage that's been done by the commercialization of it. That's all.

Bob Marshall: But when you say "dangerous territory" you're saying, "Buddy, you better know what you're talking about if we're going to explore it, because you will get..."

Frank Zappa: Well, I say that facetiously. I"m not threatening anybody.

Bob Marshall: But it's "dangerous" because it's so little known today.

Frank Zappa: Yeah, there's just no comprehension of it. There are certain types of music that have been ruined by media exposure. For example, what do we really know about Mozart. They made a movie about him and there are so many Mozart records, but what is that? That ain't what Mozart was. Can we know? And by the same token, can we really understand the mentality that went into producing Doo-wop records unless you knew what that world was? I think we got maybe about a six- month turn-over for each musical interest-cycle now, at the this point in the Eighties. Whoever was the big hit six months ago - "O.K, next!" It's got nothing to do with the quality of what the person did, or what the music is about. It's not new so you don't want it. With that sort of mentality working in the marketplace, how can you address a musical marketplace with that mindset about something that has to be totally irrelevant to them. This is so many interest- cycles ago that why trouble them with descriptions of Doo-wop music.

Bob Marshall: And that brings in the time factor for consumers in the sense that we live almost 200 years every twelve months in terms of trend turn-over, or possibilities for interest- cycles.

Frank Zappa: Yeah, and I think they're becoming shorter. I've also talked about the End of the World being a question of whether it's going to be by fire, ice, paperwork, or nostalgia. And there's a good chance that it's going to be nostalgia because the distance between the event and the nostalgia for the even has gotten shorter and shorter and shorter with each nostalgia cycle. So, projecting into the future, you could get to a point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that step you just took that you would literally freeze in your tracks to experience the nostalgize of the last step, or the last word, or your last whatever. The world just comes to a halt - remembering.

Bob Marshall: That was McLuhan's point. He said that the electric environment creates such a turn-over of information retrieval and projection that whole societies would turn to "stone". Which I see as the reason why people are getting supposedly "conservative". They're just freezing in their "time zone", but there's an underlying paradox because they are also turning over these cycles faster.

Frank Zappa: That's perverting the concept of what conservatism is. True conservatism is the guy who wants smaller government and lower taxes, and that's me. And everything else that has been appliqued on to that term has more to do with religious fanaticism and Fascist politics, and stuff like that. "Conservative" is the wrong word. I don't think that Americans, in the way they think of themselves as being nice, kind, free, fair, good-natured, jolly little individuals, would willingly opt for Fascism, but they could easily be tricked into it. All you have to do is tell them that it's a candy apple, or whatever the lies are that are going on right now. Literally, they are being molded into something that is as potentially dangerous to the rest of the world as Nazi Germany was in the Thirties and Forties. But tricked into it by people who have just lulled them into this false sense of security, and they wave a little American flag over it and everybody just has this knee-jerk reaction that they've got to buy it.

Bob Marshall: Well, it occurs to me, when you'[re talking about nostalgia cycles, that may be why people have the desire to end the election as soon as possible. They can't keep their interest on the two-year campaign like they used to.

Frank Zappa: I don't know whether anybody truly wants to be interested in a campaign for two years, and I think that's one of the reasons why they run them for two years. Because they want to numb the electorate. They want to keep the voter turn-out low. If you keep the voter turn-out low, then you realize that the only people who have managed to stay interested long enough have to be weird. The average guy, who just wants to exercise his democratic right to vote, he's so turned off by the whole thing. He's seen these guys over and over, he's heard the lies, he's looked at it and just gone "Yuck!" And now it's not a privilege to vote. It's a horrible obligation and they don't even want to know about it. And especially when you tell them that the election's already over, then why should they bother? Why should they leave their job or go, especially on the East Coast when it's cold, to someplace in November to pull a handle or poke a hole in a piece of paper? Who cares? The election's over. They want you to believe that.

Bob Marshall: Isn't this a major disservice caused by the television age? And if humanists or conservatives were really concerned, they'd say, "We've got to turn off this electric environment" as one of the means to attempting to solve all their problems.

Frank Zappa: You can't. You have to use it. You can't just turn it off. I think that the electric environment could be one of the greatest boons to mankind if it were run by people who had mankind's interest at heart, but there's not an ounce of that. There's no benevolence in the network I guarantee you.

Bob Marshall: I'm reminded of a quote you made back in the late Sixties: "If you really want to change society, infiltrate the military". Do you want to elaborate on that? Is that obvious? Do you think anybody would do that?

Frank Zappa: I don't think that any of the people who have let's say, humanistic concerns ever took me up on that one. Because the military is something that is never going to be dismantled as long as people are in their current state of evolutionary development. They still believe in the need for war. And I believe that it is impossible to do away with the military, from a practical standpoint, just because there are people on this planet, who are less sophisticated than ourselves, who would be more than happy to do harm to us. So, you have to be able to protect yourself against it. However, to do a good job, you should do it efficiently. You should know what you're doing. Cut the bullshit and go do it, you know? I like to see people who are not bullshit people in positions where they make decisions. People who have more of a long- range view. you need people in every profession, and the military is a profession, who have a long-range view. What is today's little action going to mean twenty-five years down the road? And why are we doing it? Is Grenada really necessary? Is Central America really necessary? Is Angola really necessary? What are we really doing? That's what I mean by telling people to go into the military. Because it is not my field of expertise, but I'm convinced that the law of averages would indicate that somewhere out there, there's somebody, who has an aptitude for military thinking, who's also a long-range thinker and who might care more about people than about rhetoric and politics. The military should be an organization which performs a service for the rest of the society just like a police force. AS long as you need it, it should be reminded that it is working for the rest of the citizenry. These are people who have been given a license to carry a gun and kill people with it, and they should not use that against the citizens which gave them the license. They should always act in the interest of the citizens that gave them permission to behave in the militaristic way.

Bob Marshall: Sop, you're saying that in the late Sixties you made that proposal and nobody responded to it, or said, "I'm going to do it, Frank."

Frank Zappa: Well, they never called me up and said, "Good idea, Frank! I'm going in now. Thanks for suggesting it". None of that kind of feedback. But I'll tell you one of the other things that I suggested, and it's been twisted and really turned around, and it turned out to be really true even though it was twisted and turned around. I also suggested we could make the world better by going into media, which is exactly the reason why Falwell and Robertson have these colleges to train people to go into media. They're going to use the same thing to put their clones in place to keep the lid on stuff, and they're out there. There was a guy who graduated from Robertson's University who was working at Fox Television Network on the Joan Rivers Show. They're out there, they're already in place. These are like moles. You don't know that they came from that brainwash camp, but if you're talking about a Christian Lord, you're talking about doing the work of an imaginary deity that wants to keep people stupid. That's the job. So, these are people who ultimately, when they are in place, will keep "content" from managing to get into the airwaves.