Kofsky: When I read into what you're trying to do in your music is not just play music, but
also agitate and educate-
Zappa: And synthesize . . .
Kofsky: It strikes me as a kind of musical version of Berthold Brecht. Might that be a
correct inference?
Zappa: Well, I'm not a Brecht fan because I don't know that much about what he does, but people keep saying that, so maybe it's true. I've read hardly
any of his stuff. I've heard the "Three-Penny Opera"-like half of it one time-couldn't sit through the rest.
Kofsky: I don't necessarily mean that you were copying him. It just seems to me that his
idea was that you could use art to galvanize people into some kind of action.
Zappa: Oh, I think we can definitely galvanize people into some kind of action. We
galvanized somebody into singing "Louie, Louie" tonight, who was asleep. [In the Mothers'
first show at the Garrick Theatre that evening, a young man who was apparently tripping out
at the time had volunteered to come up from the audience and sing "Louie, Louie"
accompanied by the Mothers.] From zero to "Louie, Louie" in ten seconds is not bad. We
can generate that sort of wave, and I hope that once we get on a footing where we can
reach more people at once, more mass-media exposure, then we'll be able to get more of
that happening. Some of the stuff we get for fan mail, although it's not huge in quantity,
what those letters are saying, no other group in the world is getting. We get fantastic letters
from anarchists, nineteen years old: "Help me in my town," and all that stuff.
Kofsky: Are those the people you want to appeal to, or is that what you want people to
do then-destroy the system?
Zappa: No, not exactly destroy it. I want it modified to the point where it works properly.
A lot of peoplethink that a new political movement, the ideal new political movement, is to
bust it all up and start all over again with tribes and feathers in your hair and everybody loves everybody else. That's a lie. Those kids don't love each other;
they're in that because it's like another club-it's like the modern-day equivalent of a street gang. It's clean pachucos, a little
hairier perhaps. But it's not right. First of all, the idea of busting it all down and starting all
over again is stupid. The best way to do it, and what I would like to see happen, what I'm
working towards, is using the system against itself to purge itself, so that it can really work.
I think politics is a valid concept, but what we have today is not really politics. It's the
equivalent of the high school election. It's a popularity contest. It's got nothing to do with politics-what it is is mass merchandising.
Kofsky: Then your kind of politics is something that raises real alternatives: say, a
thorough revamping of American foreign policy-doing away with the American Empire;
really discussing the issues that exist and not simply running two television candidates.
Zappa: Right.
Kofsky: How do you envision the connection between what you're doing now and
generating that kind of a movement?
Zappa: First of all, I would like to manufacture a thing called the Interested Party-I'm
taking steps in that direction now-which would be a third party that lives up to its name.
Kofsky: Then it would be a second party, really.
Zappa: Actually, yes. The people that would be active in such a venture would have to
be the ones . . . in every small town there's a little guy that lives there that knows what's happening and everybody think she's a creep, and he's the only
one who's right, you
know? We have a way of reaching these people, because they come to us, they find us,
because they say, "Maybe there's a chance." So suppose we don't sell ten million albums.
We've reached most of those kids in those towns. A lot of them have written to us, and the
other ones have heard and at least been made aware that somebody is thinking in the
direction that they're thinking. I think what we do is really constructive, although a lot
of people are repelled superficially by the sound of it, the way we look, and some of the
grotesque action on stage. But those are all therapeutic shockwaves.
Kofsky: Sometimes when you insult the audience, as in "You're Probably Wondering
Why I'm Here," and in the notes to the first album-this is all part of the thing of stinging
them into action, isn't it? You're trying to arouse them and make them angry instead of
apathetic.
Zappa: Yes, yes, I think that it's easier to make somebody mad than to make somebody
love. And seeing as how hate is the absolute negative of love, if you can evoke hate and
it's really there, you can polarize it, and then you really could have love.
Kofsky: Don't you think that this emphasis on love that we see among hippies really
reflects not so much their ability to love at the moment, but their desire to create the kind
of society where it will be possible to love?
Zappa: No, I think that what they do is a definite indication of their inability to love,
because the whole hippie scene is wishful thinking. They wish they could love but they're
full of shit, and they're kidding themselves into saying, "I love! I love! I love!" And the
more times they say it, the more times they think they love. But like it doesn't work, and
most of them don't have the guts to admit to themselves that it's a lie.
Kofsky: Do you think that this is because it's an early phase of the thing?
Zappa: Oh yeah, I see it growing into something that really works. I'm glad the kids are pretending they're dropping out, because when they find out that
that doesn't work they'll
be ready for some sort of action.
Kofsky: Revolutionary action?
Zappa: Sure. I think a revolution-not the sloppy kind, but the kind that really works-you
know, it's about time for that.
Kofsky: Do you want to distinguish between sloppy kind and-?
Zappa: The sloppy kind is blood-in-the-street and all that bullshit. Today, a revolution
can be accomplished by means of mass media, with technical advances that Madison
Avenue is using to sell you washing machines and a loaf of bread and everything else.
This can be used to change the whole country around-painlessly.
Kofsky: How so?
Zappa: Because all those facilities are available, and facilities that the people are using
now on Madison Avenue- there are techniques above and beyond that which they aren't
aware of and which I think I've come into-things that they're not ready to believe exist yet.
Because they have a tendency to get into a formula, like they get into their bag with their motivational researchers with their degrees, who have only
scratched the surface of what
the youth movement is about. They don't know youth from shit. And that's the market.
You know they're still selling products to the youth on a glandular level. There are ways
to move the youth to action through their brains and not through their glands. You have
to start off part of the thing on the glandular level just to get their interest.
Kofsky: As you do now.
Zappa: But we're not nearly as glandular as most of the rock and roll bands, because
we're not selling sex that much.
Kofsky: Well, you insult people too much to be really glandular. You challenge them.
Zappa: But we've got enough so they don't lose interest in us completely. If we tried to
just be straight up there and sing our songs and go away, we wouldn't make it, because
we're old men compared to rock-and-roll standards, and there's no sex appeal to an old
man singing a straight song. So if we do something that makes us bizarre, we got that
happening for us.
Kofsky: The thing that occurs to me at this point is, we know the powers that be in
this country are pretty much opposed to people revolutionizing their society-witness the
way Johnson deals with Vietnam when the Vietnamese try to do that. Do you think that
those same powers would be any more lenient with you if it looked like you were trying
to take everything they had away from them?
Zappa: First of all, it will never look to them like I'm going to take everything away
from them, because I'm not taking it all away from them-I have no intention of taking
it all away from them.
Kofsky: Well, taking their power. I didn't necessarily mean taking their personal
possessions. But their power right now is the ability to command what the man on the
street thinks through their control of the mass media and so on and so forth.
Zappa: That's where I have one basic human drive on my side that they can't defeat-
greed.You see, they're so greedy, and the powers that be are not necessarily the
government, but you're talking about big industry and the military and all, and that's greed-motivated activity. Industry wants to make money and I'm getting
into a phase
now where I'm being used by industry to move products. A lot of the industries now
are aware of the fact that they're in a vicious cycle: in order to sell their goods to the
youth market, which accounts for the major market of most of American products,
that same market that buys most of the records, you have a weird situation where in
effect record companies especially are helping to disseminate the information which
will cause the kids to wake up and move and eventually destroy what they stand for,
and they can't help it.
Kofsky: Ralph Gleason tells me that this is happening by kids in the Haight-Ashbury
in particular, by simply turning their back on big-corporation society and going out
and creating a parallel society of their own.
Zappa: That doesn't work. They can't survive. That's like saying, "We're going to
secede from the union; we'll have our town secede from the union." That's stupid.
Kofsky: In a sense, I agree with you, but it also seems to me that there's a certain
element of wishful thinking in what you propose, too. In my rigid Marxist bag, it does
seem to me that the power Elite (or ruling class), when you get to that point where it
looks as though you are somehow going to emancipate the population from taking
orders from them, they simply aren't going to let you have it that easily. They are going
to try to do the same thing they tried to do to Fidel Castro or to Ho Chi Minh . . .
Zappa: That's all a question of how you perceive what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying
to take power.
Kofsky: No, I'm not saying you're trying to take power, but you are trying to-
Zappa: You originally brought up the question of power. Now, power is a thing that
bears on this case, but what we're really talking about is modifying the system just so
it works. The present principles of democracy that were originally set up when they
invented it aren't being applied today, and I think that with an educated population,
democracy works. So what we need are things that would change the shape of education.
Kofsky: I didn't mean that you personally wanted to take power, but I do think that
you meant that you wanted to undermine the power of those people who have it now-the
power to control people's minds.
Zappa: It's like this. A person likes to feel useful in the society; people have certain
things that they can do. I happen to have a knack for doing that sort of thing, and if I
can apply it to good use, it gives me satisfaction just to know that I'm functioning.
Where normally, you know, I wouldn't have a chance to use my trade, because what I
can do is spread out over a broad range of activities. I like to do them all because it
feels good to do that. If I can help at the same time, that's groovy. If it works, fine. If
it doesn't work, at least I kept myself occupied for a while.
Kofsky: So in other words, this isn't some rigid prescription that you're trying to
force on people?
Zappa: No! If I thought it was like that, I'd be wearing armbands or be out there with
a costume-on-the-robe-and doing it with some showmanship. But we've taken our time
about presenting our case and the scene itself has been developing at a rate-it seems like
its developing slower than I wanted it to. But, I am not in a position of where I can govern
the growth rate
Kofsky: No, isn't it a question of feedback from your audience to you, I would imagine?
Zappa: Yes and no. We keep track of what's going on out there, but what they do and
what they say doesn't have a hell of a lot of bearing on what we're going to do for them.
Except that I try to forecast certain social-politital events. We have some material that's
going into the next album about the concentration camps in California-you're seeing this
before the world even knows what the tune is because I turned these out the other day.
These are going on the album, The Mothers and Lenny Bruce, which is due for September release.
Kofsky: Well, how does that go? Is it going to be real Lenny Bruce on there?
Zappa: Yeah. I'm editing the tapes of Lenny's and interspersing these special tunes,
so we come up with an oratorio thing, and the name of the album is Our Man in Nirvana.
Kofsky: I suspected that you and I had a lot in common, and one of the things we had
in common was being turned on by Lenny Bruce.
Zappa: Yeah.
Kofsky: Besides growing up in Los Angeles, putting twin pipes on our car and
reprimering the right front fender and going to drive-ins. I wonder if anybody
understands all of that kind of thing?
Zappa: They don't.
Kofsky: That whole album [Freak Out!] is Southern California. Nobody else knows
what a swimming pool is.
Zappa: No, this is a new type of Iyric that I'm getting into. These are also social-
political things. This is straight bizarre lyric, based on-I made research tapes of behavior
of some seventeen-year- old kids in Ontario, California, and this is based on those tapes.
Kofsky: How long do you carry some of this stuff around in your head?
Zappa: Well, "Call Any Vegetable", for example, was written two weeks after we
finished Freak Out!, when we were in Hawaii, and it took a year to learn how to play
it. "Son of Suzy Creameheese" took a year to learn how to play. Can you tell why?
The time, the time-it's fantastic. It's four bars of 4/ 4, one bar 8/8, one bar of 9/8- O K?
And then it goes 8/8, 9/8, 8/8, 9/8, 8/8, 9/8, then it goes 8/8, 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, and back into
4/4 again. To get it together now, we just toss it off and it becomes a flop.
Kofsky: Are there a lot of splices on "Absolutely Free"? I thought I detected places
where there were very abrupt changes, and it hadn't been like you paused and changed
tempo. but that you'd spliced one part into another. Am I right about that?
Zappa: Oh, yeah. There was a lot of editing. Since that time, we've adjusted our
playing so we can sound like we've been edited. I like that effect.
Kofsky: When I've heard jazz groups change tempos, they usually pause and make
it quite apparent that the tempo is being changed.
Zappa: That's silly though.
Kofsky: Yes, it is silly.
Zappa: Because you lose the impact.
Kofsky: Yes. Why aren't the lyrics to "Absolutely Free"-
Zappa: More intelligible?
Kofsky: No. Let me back up. I've heard rumors-I know rumors are unreliable-that
there was some censorship problem in making this album.
Zappa: Yes, there were.
Kofsky: And I wondered if you deliberately made the lyrics unintelligible.
Zappa: No. The censorship problem was not in the lyrics being unintelligible on
the record. I wanted to print the libretto as the liner notes.
Kofsky: That was my next question. Why wouldn't they let you?
Zappa: There's a legal difference between what's on the record and what's on paper.
Kofsky: In other words, you can say it and not get-
Zappa: You can sing it, and that's part of a work of art; but the liner notes to an
album are not-you can't defend that in court as a work of art.
Kofsky: Who's the genius who decided that?
Zappa: M-G-M legal department. And this is the one that'll really kill you. You see
that copy [of the libretto to "Absolutely Free"] you've got in your hand? Look what
they censored out of it-the word "thirteen"! "She's only thirteen and she knows how
nasty" [from "Brown Shoes Don't Make It]. You know what they took out? The word
"thirteen," not nasty. Yes, they wanted us to say that she was . . .Look: "Magnificent
Instrumental, Ejaculation Number 1." They had to cross it out and change to "Climax."
[Laughter] You dig? They wanted to change, "I'd like to make her do a nasty on the
White House lawn," [from "Brown Shoes" . . .] they wanted to change it to-
Kofsky: White House bathroom?
Zappa: No, "I'd like to make her do the crossword puzzle on the back of TV Guide."
