http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-ca-zappa21-2008sep21,0,5110786.story
For Gail Zappa, that means making sure that her late husband 'has the
last word in terms of anybody's idea of who he is. And his actual
last word is his music.'
By Lynell George, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 21, 2008
WHOEVER devised the slipknot contract clause "into perpetuity" hadn't
conceived a Gail Zappa. She's made it her job to parse the music
industry's dense legalese, close contractual loopholes and, most
significantly, end what she sees as its iron grip on an artist's
past, present and future.
"Let me say it in the simplest way," she lays it out, her full hand
on the table, "My job is to make sure that Frank Zappa has the last
word in terms of anybody's idea of who he is. And his actual last
word is his music."
To that end, Gail Zappa has become a vocal advocate for artists'
rights. The wife of the late musician-composer Frank Zappa, she has
been keeping watch over not just her husband's image and brand but
his legacy. Despite what people might think, her dogged efforts are
not about erecting razor-wire around all things Zappa but protecting
his memory.
Yes, she knows all about the finger-pointing and the grousing, the
battles with the record labels about who owns what; the fury and
frustration of fans who are unable to download the most famous and
seminal works of the Zappa canon. The Zappa Family Trust is in the
middle of a dust-up with Rykodisc; Gail Zappa is suing Rykodisc over
"copyright infringements including digital rights."
It's not the first time the Zappas have been in a legal dance: In
1977, Frank Zappa filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. Records and
his former manager citing artistic grievances and questioning certain
"creative accounting practices," Gail says. After an out-of-court
settlement was reached in 1982, the rights to his master recordings
reverted to him, a lucrative boon.
December marks the 15th anniversary of Frank Zappa's passing, but
interest in him and the work continues only to grow. "No two of
Frank's shows were ever the same, which is one of the reasons he was
one of the most heavily bootlegged artists," Gail explains.
Tapping into that interest, in the last few years, the Zappa Family
Trust has begun to release rarities from the Zappa vault. Frank was
an obsessive chronicler, recording both audio and video (in every
conceivable format) of his process. Gail has established two labels
-- reconstituting Zappa and launching Vaulternative -- to showcase
that material, which includes band rehearsals from the '60s and live
footage selected by Gail with the assist of Vaultmeister Joe Travers.
This summer, they've issued on DVD the concert film "The Torture
Never Stops" in Frank Zappa's original edit and "One Shot Deal," a
previously unreleased compilation of guitar-focused music. Reissues
of Zappa's first solo album, 1967's "Lumpy Gravy," and the following
year's "We're Only In It for the Money" are in the offing. Coinciding
with all of this is the very first staging of his 1979 rock opera,
"Joe's Garage," at Hollywood's that, loosely speaking, chronicles the
travails of an imaginary guitarist named Joe. Gail gave the
first-time greenlight.
"I'm the front-of-house mixer," Gail Zappa says, settling into a soft
chair near Travers, just to the right of an old console setup in what
was most recently Frank's editing room in their Laurel Canyon home.
Gail usually makes herself available only for the nuts-and-bolts
sound bite related to a release, "but it's not often that I can get
into the grommets and widgets and explain what's behind all of this."
Her position hasn't always made her popular -- she's butted heads at
times with everyone from record execs and label lawyers to fan boards
and tribute bands. "I can't go out and be the rebuttal witness every
minute because I just end up looking like the screaming shrew that
I'm getting the reputation for being."
But she has her reasons, and they're rooted in a promise: "My job is
to make sure that everything is as clean as you can get it. . . . I
don't want anybody standing between the audience and what Frank's
intention as a composer was and still is. [W]hat I've discovered in
the process . . . comes down to one simple thing. Because everybody
wants to remake his image. And they can . . . Well, they can all pound salt!"
Fifteen years gone, and Frank Zappa still casts a long shadow. Gail,
like Travers, often speaks of him in present tense. And though, on
this late-summer afternoon, no one occupies Frank's old console
chair, there are all sorts of winking reminders salted about
everywhere. Gold records and old album covers. A "Nixon for Governor"
poster hangs on a far door. Scores of "Zappa" license plates, gifts
from fans from across the country, frame the old console, and
photographs, tucked into unexpected places, have a fun-house effect:
the eyes seem to follow you. It's not a spirit that hovers but an
ethos; standards to be upheld. Gail Zappa is not custodian of a ghost
but of a force that still has power to prod and provoke.
Keeping watch keeps her busy. There are the cover bands to police,
and there is even the historical narrative of Frank's band The
Mothers to keep close tabs on. It can be all over the map -- tribute
bands asserting that they are "embodying the spirit of Frank Zappa,"
an old band member claiming collaborator status. "Do you remember
'Police Woman'? Pepper?" Gail Zappa asks. "That's me. The ultimate
Sgt. Pepper."
One of the front-burner issues has been the digital music rights for
the work that makes up Frank Zappa's primary catalog. Many recording
artists have expressed their distaste for digital sound, arguing that
when their work is compressed into MP3 files, it can seem flat and
thin. What the public might not know, Gail says, "is that it was
Frank's concept to limit [the sale] to a format so that it was
accurately represented, that being 16-bit technology -- CDs. He
didn't want it compressed. So we're currently in a lawsuit over this issue."
What's at stake here is intent: "iTunes has been from the get-go
massively compressed. That's fine perhaps if you're Britney Spears .
. . but it's not fine for Frank Zappa's music, and he was interested
in protecting that." A spokesperson for Rykodisc parent Warner Music
had no comment.
Peering into genius
TO LABEL Frank Zappa an iconoclast would only be rounding the corner
of the neighborhood where he and his imagination reside. There's so
much stirring at every turn and busy intersection: glances of
doo-wop, blues, faux-psychedelia. His music couldn't be fenced-in in
terms of genre. In fact, much of it is an amalgam of styles --
embracing, say, heavy artillery guitar-rock with nods to composers
Igor Stravinsky or Edgard Varèse -- that reflected his citizen-of-the
world sensibilities.
Angular and antic, prescient and political and vamped-up in tricky
time signatures, Zappa was of his time -- as a commentator and a
critic -- and light years ahead of it. "Frank often said," Gail says,
"that his job was to go 'out there' and come back . . . and tell you
what I found out.'"
Part of the idea behind opening the vaults was to chart those travels
and to give audiences an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at the
composer's process. As Vaultmeister, Travers isn't just cataloging
the contents, but, he says "also investigating the possibilities."
Since 1995, Travers, the drummer for a band led by Frank's son
Dweezil, Zappa Plays Zappa, has been sifting through the assets; a
wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling audio/video and all-manner of
miscellany magic library.
Though every silver film canister, tape box or VHS shell is marked in
Frank Zappa's own hand, "it doesn't mean that you'll find what you
think in there," says Travers, so there is a fair amount of
mind-reading and extrapolating. There is basically every kind of
format that music was archived on from the '50s to the '70s, and
Travers has about 40% of it cataloged both on hard drive and CD.
Travers works closely with Gail, submitting ideas for releases.
Ultimately, she has the final word. "I kind of look at the
progression of the releases, like if we've released a record from a
band in 1976, I don't want to stay in that realm. I want to jump
around and try to cover different areas. . . . I try to prioritize a
lot of things that Frank didn't," Travers says. "There is an album. .
. called 'Wazzoo,' which is a 20-piece band that Frank only did eight
shows with but never released anything from. But we just did."
The Zappa label is dedicated to work wholly produced by Frank Zappa,
while Vaulternative highlights old sessions, rehearsals, sonic
threads long stored away. The Zappa Family Trust has about 40
projects in the works, Gail says.
"We could easily put out five to eight projects a year and can do
that for the next few years." That would make Zappa almost as
prolific as he was when he was living.
"Years ago my husband said, 'Sell everything and get out of this
horrible business.' Did I listen? No. I tried. I really tried. But I
realized early on that I have to defend his right to have been here
in the first place," Gail says.
So all of this, every choice, weighs heavy. "The best thing that I
can hope is to . . . keep windows open to be able to discover the
music. If [people] get to the original recordings, and even Zappa
Plays Zappa and other groups that respect the intent of the composer
then that music is going to be with them for the rest of their lives.
"It is not a causal relationship," she says. "So that's the reason,
the whole motivation for what I do what I do. Because I owe it to
Frank and what I feel about his music. When it's said and done, I
still work for that guy."
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