Bob Marshall: Where I get the idea part is, I remember you did an interview in the L.A. Free Press in the summer of '69 and you mentioned Pauline Oliveri's work with sound, above the audible and below, creating a mass, and you liked that idea.

Frank Zappa: Not that it created a mass. It created something audible. It produced a sum indifference tone which happened to be located within the audible frequency range. By combining something so high you couldn't hear it and something so low you couldn't hear it, it yielded something in the middle that you could hear. Whether or not you like what you hear in the middle is another question. The concept is brilliant.

Bob Marshall: Yeah, because it showed you how physical reality is, or the way it is, right?

Frank Zappa: It's one aspect of it.

Bob Marshall: Are there other aspects you could talk about?

Frank Zappa: If you buy the idea that the vibrational rates translate into matter, and then if you understand the concept of vibrational rates above perception and below perception combining to create a reality, that opens up the door to some pretty science-fiction matter possibilities. If you can create an audible reality by a sine wave above the range of what your ear can hear and another one from below, and you put them together and suddenly it creates something that your ear can detect, is it not possible that solid matter of an unknown origin could manifest periodically because of frequencies of some unknown nature above and below which, for short durations, manifest solid objects? It could explain a lot of strange things that people see.

Bob Marshall: UFO's come to mind immediately.

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: There's much in the Theosophical literature, in the mystical literature, and the mediumistic literature that says that's the way reality is, and they hoick that up as an explanation, but science traditionally doesn't buy that.

Frank Zappa: I don't approach any of this stuff from a mystical standpoint. I'm not a mumbo-jumbo guy. I think that there are physical realities and most of them are not understood. Part of the reason why science moves so slow is because many of the people who do science and who receive grants have to be "conservative" individuals in order to receive the money to do the research. And people who can convince a foundation, or a funding source, that they are conservative enough not to squander the money are not really the best guys or gals to do science. Give me some Teslas, bring out some Teslas here. Give me some maniacs. Let's just try it and see what happens. That's the way you're going to get stuff to happen. The other criteria by which people are funded is whether or not the end result of the research will yield something that explodes or kills. If you can convince a funding organization that you have a new way to kill, and you are conservative and won't squander the money, you can be in the science business.

Bob Marshall: So much of what you say is common sense and what people have said a lot, maybe through history. But since World War Two, there have been a lot of books written and movements come up, and nobody seems to have the staying power to apply it in a practical way. They get lost in the ideal of "this is the way it should be", and then fumble when given the opportunity, or don't even know the odds they're up against.

Frank Zappa: Well, another thing you have to remember about all science and all art: it is impossible if you're starving to death. Society has to reach a point where you can be self-sustaining to the point where your basic physical needs are taken care of so you can allow your brain to think about stuff like art and science. That's why artists and scientists have to keep their eye on the economy. Because if things get tough, they can't do their shit anymore.

Bob Marshall: Scientists and artists?

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: So, that's another warning.

Frank Zappa: Because as the economy declines, the willingness of people who control cash to spend for research on things other than stuff that kills... basically it has to kill you or you're not going to get any money for it. For every cure for something, implied in it is: withholding the cure causes death. So, basically, if you want to be a large-scale murderer, you can clean up. Occasionally, when times are good, they'll fund something else - by accident, who knows how it happens? ? But when times are tough those projects never get a buck and actually research departments close down. You can't afford to run them anymore so the only thing that's left is weapons. And once you build a weapon, what are you going to do? You gotta use the weapon. And the thing has to have planned obsolescence so you can update the weapon. It's the spare parts contract that's really the thing that all these defense guys are interested in. Everything wears out. They're not going to run these new weapons in a test environment. They're going to be in the desert. Dirt will get in there. Gotta sell them some more camshafts. Whatever it is, they're looking at long-range economic benefits from building a weapon. And in order to use something that kills people, you have to have a reason to kill people - a war. If not a war, a regional conflict, a small war. AT very least you have to single out somebody to be an enemy and you have to direct your national interest to the destruction of the enemy. Now, we've been going along for years with Communism. Only it's not working so well anymore because the Communist just did some ju-jitsu. They're becoming Capitalists. And what the fuck is going to happen then? Who are we going to go after then? This is a big worry.

Carolyn Dean: The public.

Frank Zappa: I think that is very true. The public. That is absolutely true. Look, this new drug law creates the position of Drug Czar, but the amendment to the drug law is this pornography bill. Did you know that?

Bob Marshall: No.

Frank Zappa: You didn't know that?

Bob Marshall: I haven't heard it.

Frank Zappa: At the last minute they attach this anti-pornography rider to the drug bill. This is to go after people that they claim have been long-time purveyors of obscene material. And what it provides is that, just as in the drug bill, if a guy has a yacht and he's using it to run cocaine, they can confiscate the yacht. Let's say you were in the record business and you had been a long-time purveyor of obscene material, they can confiscate all of your property. This goes back twenty years. It's a twenty-year retroactive bill.

Bob Marshall: When was that implemented?

Frank Zappa: Yesterday.

Bob Marshall: When was it discussed? You mean, it was made a law yesterday?

Frank Zappa: Look, you know about the drug bill. They've been diddling with this thing for quite some time, but on the side... I actually saw the debate on C-Span. I think the thing was drafted by Strom Thurmond and rammed through by Orrin Hatch. They first tried to attach it to some child care bill.

Bob Marshall: This is earlier this year?

Frank Zappa: This is within the last month.

Bob Marshall: Really?

Frank Zappa: Yes.

Bob Marshall: O.K. I've been on vacation for this past month. i've missed this.

Frank Zappa: Congress is trying to shut down, they all want to go home and campaign. And they're trying to crank out all this legislation. So, yesterday it was announced on CNN that they had attached this amendment to the drug bill in order not to have a mutiny by the conservatives in the Congress. So, all the Democrats went along with it and allowed them to paste this. The drug bill is bad enough, but they've pasted this other thing onto it. So, the drug bill allows for the creation of a Drug Czar. Can there be a Porno Obscenities Czar coming up within a matter of moments if they actually make this a law? I think the whole thing is unconstitutional, but before you can take it to the Supreme Court for a test case, you know Reagan will sign this thing. It'll be on the books, they'll be out there enforcing it and then there will be a test case that will go to the Supreme Court. Now, if they delay it long enough to go to the Supreme Court, they're going to have all right-wing judges on there. They're going to uphold the law and what you will have at that point is the machinery that the Nazis would have loved to have had in place at the beginning of their career. This offers the legal right to stamp out any kind of intellectual activity because there's no legal definition of obscenity. You can't really nail it down. And any person can claim that something is obscene. Here's another thing it allows for: Not only the confiscation of property, but it allows for prosecution of the person making it, the person shipping it, and the person receiving it. You don't even have to buy it. If you received it, you can be subject to this law. It is the most broadly written, nefarious piece of legislation I have ever heard.

Bob Marshall: And it was made law yesterday, October 20.

Frank Zappa: I don't think it's been signed into law yet. I believe that they announced that the porno amendment was attached to the drug bill yesterday. I believe there's still some discussion. But I have no doubt that it stands a very good chance of getting through, partly because a lot of the people in the Congress have already gone home to campaign, and they're not even there to vote on it. And you know the conservatives are going to be there to vote on it because it's the Fascist dream come true.

Bob Marshall: : How did you put your biography together? I understand you have this other writer.

Frank Zappa: Well, there's a sad, sad story. In January, before the tour, we're rehearsing, and I had this obligation with Simon and Schuster to do the book and I'd been putting it off. And while we were rehearsing, we'd rehearse from two in the afternoon until one o'clock in the morning, and from one until six A.M. for three weeks, every night I would sit here with this guy and do taped interviews. And we'd just talk about whatever we wanted to talk about, and then he went away and had it transcribed and changed it from the way I talked into book talk. And when he sent it back, I hated it. So, when I finished the tour, I went in and rewrote it. I just took advantage of what he had collated, but I put it back into my own words. So, it's not like "as told to". It's not exactly like one of those kinds of things. It really has more to do with the way I write and the way I talk than it would have.

Bob Marshall: So, it's better that he screwed it up because you didn't have the time before.

Frank Zappa: That's right. I mean, I was forced to do it. The result, I thought, was so bland that I couldn't possibly have my name on it. No way. I don't care what they were going to pay me for it. There was no way. I just had to force myself to sit for six weeks in this little room up there and type a book.

Bob Marshall: That was July-August?

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: Well, I'm glad that happened because when I had heard about this guy Peter Occhiogrosso doing it, I said, "Oh, well, it's going to be filtered through him". But it's not. That's much better.

Frank Zappa: It's much better. It's got some funny stuff, and there is at least three chapters that I wrote from scratch that never even went to tape. Because some of the stuff is so complicated, there's no way to take it off a tape. If you convert a conversation into the type of data that had to be in the book, there's no way to say it precisely without writing it from scratch, and that's what I tried to do.

Bob Marshall: If you had written a book and said, "Hey, publish this", they might not have done it. It had to go through the book Establishment, the book industry connections.

Frank Zappa: Not necessarily because Simon and Schuster would have loved for me to have agreed right away to write the book. I'm the one who said, "Look, I don't want to write a book".

Bob Marshall: Oh, is that right?

Frank Zappa: I'm happy to have the money, but...

Bob Marshall: They were interested in what you had to say in your own words?

Frank Zappa: This particular editor was, yeah. She thought there was a market for it, not that she didn't give a fuck what I'm saying. Based on some of the things that she wanted to take out of the book, I don't really believe there's any deep- seated understanding of what the contents are, but she saw it as a merchandising winner. She thinks she can sell them, and they're going to have it in paperback sitting in airports before the end of the year.

Bob Marshall: And there will be a lot of political information in it?

Frank Zappa: There's not so much information as my attitudes toward certain things. There's a whole chapter on conservatism. There's another chapter on religion. There's a long chapter on the PMRC and all the unreleased data about that. A lot of stuff about music. Just all different topics.

Bob Marshall: What I was trying to think of earlier was your emphasis on chemical terms to point out that music is "food." I mean, maybe that was an attitude in the Forties and Fifties. There was this lofty ethereal approach to art, and your...

Frank Zappa: What's lofty and ethereal about that? I mean chemistry is real.

Bob Marshall: No, that's what I'm saying. That you brought in the chemical, physical metaphors, in a scientific sense. Being like a scientist approaching sound and music.

Frank Zappa: I got that from Varese. He was moving in that direction, too. He was the first clue that I had to that type of thinking.

Bob Marshall: That was when you were young?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, fifteen.

Bob Marshall: That's interesting. McLuhan once said, "Science is moving closer to Art, and Art is moving closer to Science". One could maybe project different meanings for those things, but your music moved towards physical metaphors.

Frank Zappa: I don't know whether I would buy "Science is moving closer to Art". I think Science is moving closer to weaponry and Art is moving closer to commercialism. And never the twain shall meet.

Bob Marshall: Yeah, but in your work, you're trying to make a point with this science, these vibrations, and talk of physics, talk of sound acoustics, bringing that into the musical - the dialogue of composition in there.

Frank Zappa: Yeah, the point is not to be mystical, or to be anything, other than to create a vocabulary wherein essential things that work in music can be described in a way that a person who deals in hard science can understand it.

Bob Marshall: So, you're trying to help the scientists get a little...?

Frank Zappa: No, because they don't care about music. Scientists care about science, but it goes back to Egyptian religion, alright. In ancient Egypt, in order for you to go to heaven, you couldn't get there unless you knew the name of everything on the way to heaven. Did you know that?

Bob Marshall: No, I didn't know that, said that way.

Frank Zappa: Well, here's what you had to know: you had to know the name of the doorstep or you couldn't walk over the doorstep. You had to know the name of each of the stones that you walked on, the name of everything because you had to ask permission to pass. Can you imagine living your life learning the names of everything you had to know in order to be dead and get to heaven. Now that's a religion! But the importance of naming things correctly is something that shouldn't be underestimated. Semantics should be more important to contemporary society. You have to give things+ the right name. If you're going to communicate verbally, you have to have the right word to tell what it's about. Now, I don't think that it benefits anyone to call a shoe a "banana". It could be poetic, but this is a shoe. Alright, I'm working in a musical, technical medium because the music I make involves machines of a scientific nature. And I have to create for myself a vocabulary, good, bad or indifferent, that allows me to deal with the topics of the data that I have to manipulate to do what I do. If I were working in a purely acoustic medium and on a simpler level, I wouldn't have this problem, but I'm straddling two worlds here. I'm straddling the world of electronics, in some cases advanced electronics, and the old-fashioned world of putting notes together to make a composition, and there's no off-the-shelf vocabulary that you can use to do that. And at the point where you see that there are physical similarities in the behaviour of the way the composition will work and the behaviour of the way the electrons will be working in the electronic gear, or whatever, if you see that, why not state it. You should say it, and once you've said it, you should use it in your everyday work. You should make it part of your reality. Now, I don't think that most of what I do is useful to other people in terms of this vocabulary, or in terms of the concepts, because they'll never use them. It's useless, but you asked the question and that's where it is.

Bob Marshall: Adam got control, according to the Bible, over the animals by naming them.

Frank Zappa: Really? They got that from the Egyptians.

Bob Marshall: Yeah.

Frank Zappa: You see, I'm not a Bible scholar. I had enough Bible when they sent me to the catechism classes when I was a Catholic, and all I know is he was full of dread. It's a religion that's based on fear and punishment and loathing. The whole Catholic version of what the Bible says and what it does is quite a bit different than the way the Fundamentalist Christians deal with it. So, I wouldn't consider myself to be conversant with the bulk of the stuff.

Bob Marshall: I think it was during that interview where you were talking about the speech-song, "sprechstimme", you were saying you had solved some musical problems. Who had those musical questions? Did Varese have them?

Frank Zappa: No, questions that I have to answer for myself. These are questions about how you get the point across. And oftentimes I've just appropriated the speech-song. When a person sings a word, the idea that is transmitted transcends the word because there's so much other data connected with the word at pitch. Understand?

Bob Marshall: Are you talking about sound?

Frank Zappa: No, the person hearing, receiving the data, is not only receiving the word.

Bob Marshall: The "meaning"?

Frank Zappa: That's right, the text of the word. He is also receiving the pitch data at which it is sung. In other words, that same word sung at a high pitch means something different than the word sung at a low pitch. He is receiving the data of the harmonic climate in which the word exists. He's also receiving the data of the relationship of the pitch of the word to the climate itself. In other words, if you have an A minor chord and the word is sung on a B, then that word is going to stick out because it's not part of the chord. There are three notes in an A minor chord - A, C, E. If you sing that word on any of the notes which are part of the chord, it recedes into the chord. It's part of the background. If the word is sung on a note which is not part of the chord, it steps out from the chord and draws attention to itself and becomes a matter of emphasis. These are the types of extra data that exist when you sing a word. An extra spin gets put on the word if you half say it, half sing it. It makes it even more 3D. It leaps out from the harmonic support and draws even more attention to itself if you've been singing along and you hear this melody and you get to this certain part and you half sing it, half say it. And it sticks out even further if you absolutely say it because it's incongruous in the setting.

Carolyn Dean: Well, that's probably activating both sides of your brain at the same time.

Frank Zappa: I don't know about that stuff. I don't know about left side/right side stuff. I'm not sure that I even buy the theory of it. To me, it sounds simplistic.

Carolyn Dean: But the music supposedly goes into your right brain and the spoken word goes into your left brain.

Frank Zappa: I don't know enough about the research that leads people to draw that conclusion to see whether or not I agree with it.

Bob Marshall: So, did you finish your explanation?

Frank Zappa: That's one of the questions: how do you get your point across? Besides what time it is, that's one of the big questions that a person ought to be asking.