Category: Music

You Didn't Try to Call Me

Per uploader vinzer72frie:

Frank Zappa
June 18, 1970
Uddel, Netherlands
Live at the "Piknik" show, VPRO, Dutch Television.

Not great sound quality, but a neat bit of history.

CBCtv, 1969

Coulda sworn I'd already posted this one but I can't find it looking through the archives, so here it is. Zappa on Canadian TV, talking about the absurdity of TV.

Dangerous Territories

Got me a wicked headache all of a sudden. Tempting as it is to post The Torture Never Stops, I am instead going with another interview courtesy of afka.net -- I'll even cop to not reading this one all the way through. But it's from Sounds, November 7, 1970, and is a piece called Zappa -- The Great Satirist, by Bob Dawbarn.

KPFA interview

I didn't catch the date but his reference to the 200 Motels album as upcoming puts it in 1970 or 1971.

The interviewer's name is Robin Baxter and she's in over her head. There are a few different ways Zappa tended to deal with interviewers who didn't seem to know what they were talking about; sometimes he'd be playful, sometimes he'd be testy, but he'd always make fun of them.

This one's got Testy Zappa.

Experiments

Another interview from Dutch TV. According to uploader Captain Jos, this is from a show called Kippevel on VARA TV in 1988, and the interviewer is Jan Douwe Kroeske.

The Last Post

Just in case you're concerned by that title: no, I'm not doing something drastic and shutting down the blog; The Last Post is the title of the article I'm linking, via afka.net. The interview was conducted in July of 1991, but wasn't published until 2004, in Mojo.

Frank hits a few of his usual topics -- business, mostly, with a little talk about his work on the Synclavier, and politics at home and abroad. In discussing the Czech Republic's first steps into capitalism, he advocates for government funding for the arts. It's always interesting reading Zappa's thoughts on economics; he was pretty fiscally conservative but certainly didn't buy into the Republican/Libertarian notion that the government is no damn good for anything and everything should be left up to the private sector.