Bob Marshall: What do you think about the minimalists?

Frank Zappa: I'm not enthusiastic about minimal music because I think that it's like the one-joke composition. You take any composition and repeat a single element for a small eternity and the joke is over. Are you going to build a career out of repeating small elements over and over and over again. The subtext to minimalism is that it's cheap to produce. The subtext to minimalism is that it's cheap to produce. It's Taco Bell music. It's cheap to rehearse, cheap to mount, and because it doesn't really offer any great intellectual challenge other than the stamina of the listener to tolerate an infinite number of repeats of a small thing, what's the message? This is a musical question which I feel is easily answered and has been answer amply many times, and so it is not a musical question that I am particularly curious about, myself.

Bob Marshall: The one we just explained - harmonic climate, note and pitch relationship - in Gestalt psychology, they talked of figure/ground, that was the way...

Frank Zappa: Oh yeah, figure/ground.

Bob Marshall: Which reminds me, you defined Gestalt in Circus magazine, back in '69, as "something big"

Frank Zappa: Gestalt, the way people normally hear the word, is when it's connected with a certain type of psychology. But Gestalt doesn't mean just that. It's like "concept", isn't it? Isn't that the real translation? An idea object, that's what I'm talking about.

Bob Marshall: See, there's idea object, matter/mind, concept art, or MIles asking, "What's the IDEA behind this, Frank?" People's interests go either for the image of the idea.

Frank Zappa: Well, you have to understand the way in which people voluntarily decide to consume something or participate in it. It has more to do with their own orientation than it has to do with the concept or the conception of the person who made the object being consumed. Got it? Like what I put into the things that I make has little or nothing to do with the way in which people consume them and the reasons they might buy a record, or buy a concert ticket, or listen to this radio broadcast, or whatever. Because those reasons have more to do with them than they do with me.

Bob Marshall: Just to switch to another level - are there any movies that you have found interesting, likeable, valuable that have come out over the past eight years that you would mention.

Frank Zappa: Movies?

Bob Marshall: Yeah, I read in some interview that you watch movies a lot.

Frank Zappa: I wouldn't say a lot. I think I watch more news that I watch movies, but the problem is that my recreational hours are limited. Usually the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up is turn on the news in our bedroom just to get a blast of that before I brush my teeth.

Bob Marshall: That's CNN Headline News. You get the repeat.

Frank Zappa: I don't get the Headline News, I get the droning long version. They cycle that in one-hour or two-hour blocks.

Bob Marshall: But it's CNN?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, CNN. So I turn on CNN and I watch that, and then I go to work, and then after I'm finished work, I'll turn on CNN, or I'll turn on C-Span and I'll scoot around and look for news. If I've already seen it or if I know what's coming up, then I'll switch to one of the movie channels and I"ll watch that. But I don't go to the movies. The only movies that I see are things that have already been out.

Bob Marshall: Any that you've found surprisingly good?

Frank Zappa: There've been a few, but I can't even remember the names of them. I think basically the quality of films in terms of content leaves me pretty empty, doesn't stimulate me at all. I used to like monster movies when I was a kid just because they were so laughable, but, even now, they're nauseating.

Bob Marshall: Around '79 you were asked if you ever cried, and you said that movies make you cry. What part? What kind of content - how bad it is?

Frank Zappa: No, no. It's completely irrational. I mean I can do the same thing going to a Broadway show. I can literally hate the show and find myself crying because of something that happened in there. And I know that the fact that liquid comes out of my eyes has got nothing to do with reality. I'm sitting there consciously thinking that this show is a piece of shit and I'm crying, and I'm saying to myself, "Well, at least I have some sort of average-scale, average-size, average-vulnerability human factors working". But at the same time I'm sitting there going "Why?" And I've given some thought as to what motivates people to have that feeling for no reason at all, to just start crying. It's not even because it's sad. And I haven't got that down to a thirty-second sound bite yet, but one of these days I will. I just know that what people normally think of as human feelings are not what they think they are. I see chemistry here.

Bob Marshall: That's very interesting because I have the same thing happening to me when I go to movies and I wonder, while I'm sitting there observing it, what physical chemistry is working on me that I know I"m not aware of, but it activates the body.

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: Well, I'm glad I asked that question. That's an interesting answer. So, you're still working on that one?

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: No policy statement yet. When you put out CRUISING WITH RUBEN AND THE JETS in '68, many people were surprised that you liked that music. Do you still like that music now? Have you changed? Would you put out CRUSING WITH RUBEN AND THE JETS now, if it hadn't been done then?

Frank Zappa: It would be harder to put it out now because we're so much farther away. '68 is a lot closer to '58 then it is to '88, and it would be hard to find vocalists. In order to give a convincing rendition of that style of music, you have to have singers who understand the idiom, and they're getting harder and harder to find.

Bob Marshall: In the book "Does This Kind of Life Look Interesting To You?", there's a picture of you from Melody Maker, about '67, under which you wrote, "Here I am, propping up the glitter shortage".

Frank Zappa: That wasn't my text.

Bob Marshall: Oh, O.K. Do you remember that?

Frank Zappa: Is it me in a dress?

Bob Marshall: Yeah.

Frank Zappa: The original headline for that was "Meet a Mother". It was the front page of Melody Maker, and the reason that I did it was we had a bunch of pictures taken with all the guys in the Mothers Of Invention wearing dresses because I think the Rolling Stones had just done a drag photo. Only they tried to make it look glamorous. And so, we had probably the ugliest band on the planet at that time. You want to see an ugly guy in a dress? Look at this son of a bitch.

Bob Marshall: So, whatever was written under there about a glitter shortage was done by someone else. I just thought it was some kind of ecological marking like "I see a trend, I create a counter-trend to balance it off". Now, you did that with CRUISING WITH RUBEN AND THE JETS. You know, you wanted people to get back to dancing together.

Frank Zappa: Oh, that was a joke. I don't think that....

Bob Marshall: Yeah, it's a joke, but it's social criticism, it's interesting. CRUISING WITH RUBEN AND THE JETS comes out then. Is it totally "I want to do this now, I want to hear this and I want to get this on record" or are you saying, "Maybe these people need to know some of this" just to balance it off?

Frank Zappa: Both those things.

Bob Marshall: Yeah, that's where you get an idea - what you would like to do, that's the fun part, and then you see a need for it.

Frank Zappa: Well, I see a need because I'm watching the news and I'm looking at my environment, and I spot trends and I say, "How can I be useful?" One useful thing I can do is say, "You're all in this trend but have you considered the possibility that there's something wrong with your trend? Have you ever doubted that maybe a Rolex watch as a life goal is perhaps not quite the pinnacle of human achievement?"

Bob Marshall: Now, that's easy to do, in a way. Maybe it's not easy to pick the right trend, but to criticize what's obvious in commercials or in magazine ads...

Frank Zappa: Well, you think it's easy unless you put yourself in a position where, if everybody believes that that's the way the world is, you run the risk of being hated by everyone because you're popping their bubble. AS if you could pop their bubble. There's no way I would ever dissuade a person who believes in the Rolex mentality from not going after the Rolex. They could care less what I think about them, but it still needs to be said.

Bob Marshall: For those who are teetering on consciousness.

Frank Zappa: That's right, right on the fucking brink. And the other thing is: maybe twenty years from now, if we're still around, and people look back on those idiot Yuppies and the stuff that they were interested in, there will be on guy who said, "Take the Rolex and stuff it"> And it's the same thing with WE'RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY album. At the time that Hippies were happening, you couldn't say anything against Hippies. They were hot merchandise. You couldn't ridicule them. And to ridicule them and have long hair, that was blasphemy.

Bob Marshall: Maybe that's why you were blacklisted.

Frank Zappa: Could be.

Bob Marshall: You screwed up the marketing, although there's probably evidence for other reasons. I heard Dave Porter's interview with you last week and I liked that part where you said, "There is still that chunk of people from the McCarthy era that are still very powerful on the political end and move through still 'fighting that fight'"

Frank Zappa: That's right. You've got to understand why they're "fighting that fight". They're not fighting a fight, they're selling a scam. The whole McCarthy era was a scam, and it was another attempt to just clamp down. It was a move toward authoritarian government. It was a tool that was used by people who wanted to move things in that direction. It wasn't just McCarthy. It was J. Edgar Hoover, he was a willing accomplice in all this stuff. He was feeding him the information.

Bob Marshall: That's what was interesting about Mae Brussell's research because she had those names that were very involved in the Fifties and then in Reagan's California government. People like Louis Giuffrida who was involved in REX 84 that was exposed by the Christic Institute. That team came from the Sixties and from the Fifties. What was interesting was that Larry MacDonald was part of that network and they were caught. Do you remember the Western Goals issue here in Los Angeles in '83?

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: It was not covered in the national media for a long time, but MacDonald's Western Goals organization was to appear before a grand jury around the middle of September of '83, but he went down in the KAL 007 two weeks before. And that's where Larry Flynt comes in because Larry questioned the standard line on the causes of the KAL 007's crash. Then he met Mae Brusell who turned him on to what was really behind this same core of people that go back to the Fifties because the files of Western Goals kept had been outlawed in the Seventies, but then the files showed up in L.A. detective Paul's wife's home computer in '83. You saw what happened to Larry then - you witnessed it.

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: What do you think of Larry being quite subdued now, and Hustler magazine being totally changed?

Frank Zappa: I haven't seen Hustler for years so I have no idea about the evolution of the magazine, but Larry was on to something. I think that he was way off base on the 007 case. I think that it's far too much to hope for - that you could willingly get the Russians to assist you by shooting down a certain plane in order to keep a guy from testifying in front of a grand jury. I think that's pushing the envelope. And I told him.

Bob Marshall: Well, he didn't say the Russians did it.

Frank Zappa: No. But, ultimately the plane was shot down by a Russian pilot, O.K. Now, if it had been blown up in mid-air by a bomb, maybe, but it was shot down.

Bob Marshall: So what was his angle on it?

Frank Zappa: He made that big full-page thing. And I was at his house when the "mechanical" for it came into his office, and I read through it and I said, "This is too extreme. People are going to laugh at you". So I gave him some language to add on to it. The first one went out without the language and I think subsequently the language was added to it, but I don't even remember the specifics of the full-page or even the language. I just know that there was something about it that just seemed a little bit skewed, and there was some stuff in there that seemed reasonable. But the way in which it was presented could have been more effective if it would have had just this extra thing at the end. And that's where I tried to help him.

Bob Marshall: And that went on the later printings of it?

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: He believed that the Russians didn't do it?

Frank Zappa: No, it's not that he believed the Russians didn't do it. He believed that there was more to it than the fact that three Russians had shot it down by accident. He was into the conspiracy. He had another axe to grind with this guy. There was something else.

Bob Marshall: You don't think that there was a conspiracy?

Frank Zappa: No, I think that it's really far-fetched to think that any right-wing covert U.S. organization could then get in touch with their friends in Russia and get them to send out the lone fighter pilot to nuke some airliner who just happens to go off course into this air space. I think that's asking too much of coincidence.

Bob Marshall: Other than it was blown up.

Frank Zappa: Yeah.

Bob Marshall: But the Russians went along with the story then. How could you get them to do that?

Frank Zappa: Yeah, how do you get that kind of cooperation? I just don't think that people are that cooperative in large-scale cover-ups. There's always something that falls out.

Bob Marshall: The overall effect of our conversation seems to be that you've acquired a lot of information. You've paid attention daily, and one can acquire a lot of information just by being open-minded. And you keep saying, "Well, obviously the common-sense solution or approach to this problem is this".

Frank Zappa: Or at least one of them. There may be more.

Bob Marshall: And so there's no conscious strategy. For example, I think in that interview in Rolling Stone, of '79, when you talked about being a journalist, you said, "I see certain elements and then I impose a pattern on them". Do you remember that quote?

Frank Zappa: No.

Bob Marshall: Unless it was a misquote. It may have been, but it suggests that...

Frank Zappa: It doesn't even seem like what I do. I don't impose a pattern on it. I look for a pattern. I don't impose a pattern on it.

Bob Marshall: yeah, it implied there's a conceptual continuity pattern that you...

Frank Zappa: Conceptual continuity has got nothing to do with me analysing the news. Conceptual continuity has got to do with me living my life and turning my life into things that entertain other people. The things that I release in the video and the records and the rest of that stuff, it's part of my life. For whatever it's worth at that time that it comes out. That's a byproduct of my life. That's the conceptual continuity. Analysing the news is not me imposing a pattern on the news. I try and get as much data as I can and then, based on what I'm able to gather together, I draw a conclusion. And those conclusions could change if I get more data.

Bob Marshall: Conceptual continuity implies an idea. The way you've just said it, it is a biographical continuity or mental....

Frank Zappa: No, no, there is a concept to what I'm doing and there is a continuity to the concept, and I happen to be living inside of the concept. I'm a participant in it.

Bob Marshall: And the concept is common sense and taking in data and learning.

Frank Zappa: That's not the conceptual continuity.

Bob Marshall: Could you correct me then? State...

Frank Zappa: Well, the conceptual continuity is this: everything, even this interview, is part of what I do for, let's call it, my entertainment work. And there's a big difference between sitting here and talking about this kind of stuff, and writing a song like "Titties and Beer". But as far as I'm concerned, it's all part of the same continuity. It's all one piece. It all relates in some weird way back to the focal point of what's going on.