punknaynowned
Frank Zappa Status
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1967 11 13 WDET FM Detroit, MI
1.
FZ: Hello there. I have the Wayne State University Widget Guide for Radio, TV Quarterly, Fall 1967. And golly it's a thrilling little book. It's one
of the , it's one of your better Detroit publications. and I was gonna read some of it to ya. I'm gonna read the best parts of it because I wouldn't
want to waste your time. On the inside page, -- actually it's the inside back cover, but it might as well be page 65 of this thrilling booklet, we
have a chart which is headed up by a little caption. Many charts have captions here in Detroit. This one says, 'Radio is the most visual medium'.
Well, we know that's a lie. But that's what they have on the chart. That's what you call your packaging myth. Now this here chart, says, at the top,
'WHPR 88.1, WSHJ 88.3, CKWW 88.7, WAOK sounds like a country and western station 89.3, WDTR 9-oh-.9, WPHS 91.5, WOUM, nine-oh, WUOM, WOUM would sound
like some sort of part of your body wouldn't it? huh-huh-huh even here in Detroit they have those things. It's 91.7. and the chart goes on all the
way down to 107.5. Now this would indicate that these are probably places on your dial where you might tune in to get information. And I would
imagine that the bulk of this book concerns itself with what you'd call your radio entertainment on an FM level. Here are some of the things they got
to offer ya. For instance, Wednesday, November first, eh-heh, bet you can hardly wait for that, six-thirty pm they have a dynamite show called About
Science and then seven o'clock they have a show called The City. At seven-thirty pm they have The Guest Lecture. Can you hardly wait? Well, I knew
you'd be excited about that. This is the Public Opinion Foreign Policy and the Historian Lecture featuring Harold Isaacs, Center for International
Studies, MIT, 'Sources For Images of Foreign Countries'. Discussing would be Melvin Small of the Department of History of WSU. This promises to be a
very soulful program. Three o'clock in the afternoon they have what you would call your call classic matinee which is featuring these thrilling
compositions. Albinoni [?], Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra in D. That's a hot one. They're going so far as to play a piece of music by
Aaron Copeland, his piano quartet with the newer quartet. They're playing all kinds of thrilling things for ya. It's too bad you're too busy to
listen to that kinda stuff. Ah, what else have we got here? Oh, I know what they ought to do right now. They oughta play Who Are the Brain Police
by the Mothers of Invention album, Freak Out. Because I just found a picture in this magazine that's got a -- ewwhh, hoho, hey you guys really oughta
get this booklet. There's a picture toward the back of the book, going at the back of the book. Two people are naked. It shows a very twisted tree
and both the people that are standing here with no clothes on are pretty twisted too. The man is uncircumcised, shows his actual peepee hanging out.
They'v gone quite a ways with this illustration. I don't know why they would include it in the program guide. And the woman has a very protruding
navel. Obviously the artist who rendered this couple doesn't think too much of the human body.
2.
FZ: Who Are The Brain Police. [song plays]3:13
3.
FZ: Oh, wonderful!
interviewer: That's really beautiful Frank. And that makes me want to ask you a question.
FZ: That doesn't make you want to ask me a question. Expediency makes you want to ask me a question because you know we have to be out of here by
one-thirty.
int: yeah, you caught me again.
FZ: mm-hmm.
int: People have been writing many many letters to the radio station, and ahh
FZ: People don't really write letters, do they?
int: Sure they do. They write a lot of letters, to the radio station and they say, 'Can you please tell us, just how the Mothers of Invention make
their albums, cuz we want to know'. And the reason they ask that question is because they know you're coming to fill the other [all their?]
auditorium.
FZ: What an obvious, an obvious commercial hype. You sound like one of those guys that I met at the airport from the BFD company.
int: They're a bad company, but they put on good shows. So everyone's been saying 'why don't ya have Frank on and tell us how they do the albums. We
really want to know'.
FZ: Alright, I'll tell ya how we do the albums. First of all, when my schedule permits, I'll sit down and write out the songs that go in the albums.
Some day I'll, if umm, -- I know that I have a certain amount of material to turn out for a certain album. Like in one day I'll sit down and write
seven songs and the rest of 'em I'll write when they happen to occur to me. A lot of the material that we record dates back four or five years.
Things I wrote a long time ago that have already been recorded before at my studio in Cucamonga. For instance, Any Way The Wind Blows and a song
that's going to be on the third album called Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance were both recorded a long time ago and taken and shopped around the
record companies in Los Angeles. About four years ago and nobody was very interested in the material at that time. Even though the masters were of
HIGH QUALITY. Oh [sniffs] I guess that's just another indication that we have no future in show business. Now some of the technical problems
involved in getting our throbbing teen sounds onto the grooves you have to understand the problems involved with recording itself. There's a definite
difference between what music sounds like when played live, when recorded on tape and when recorded on disc and each medium has it's own acoustical
problems. Tape and disc have different tolerances as to how much volume can be put on. In live performance, your volume level is, ahhmm, determined
basically by the wattage of your amplifier and how long it takes before your ears start bleeding once you turn the amplifiers up. Some of what we do
is very loud in live performance and it's difficult to make it sound right when you put it on the tape. 'Cuz as soon as you start recording it the
needle goes over into the red and just lays there, sort of whimpering. And when you try and transfer that tape to disc you have more problems because
they have to chop the top off. The highs, the high frequencies and they cut all the low frequencies off and leave the middle of what's left. And
sometimes I'm very disappointed when I listen to what we play when I hear it on records. Because it doesn't sound like what we play. But I suppose
that's what ya have to put up with. Let's take for instance, a song like America Drinks and Goes Home from our second album Absolutely Free. And I
suppose that -- hmmm? No, I'm looking at the guy in the control room and he's sticking his finger in the air and smiling and doing all kinds of
bizarre numbers in there. Which would indicate that he is probably, maybe even possibly, maybe he's considered that it might be a good time to play
that tune, so that we could discuss it. But he can't do it because I'm holding the record. Oh!
4.
[song, America Drinks plays] 2:32
5.
FZ: Oh! swell. Now I'll tell you what's in that tune. First of all, the chord changes are a satire on the -- ohh, typical set of chord changes used
for all songs of that type from the beginning of time up to now. uhh, I don't know whether or not if you can really imagine a parody of a set of
chord changes but that's what's in it. The chord changes amount to a series of 2-5-1's rotating around the circle of fifths. Our parody consists of
instead of going around the circle of fifths like the old folks used to do, we made the 2-5-1's go in funny directions where they wouldn't normally
go. It's a little bit more adventurous chord progression than the normal - ahh stock ballad chord progression. The words are just about as putrid as
I could make them and from there we had to decide on a proper musical performance for this ditty. Chose the medium of the cocktail piano accompanied
by strummed guitar. The way that guitar players used to play it in bar's that I worked in as a youth. The guitar player sits on a stool wearing a
tux-coat and bowtie. He wears black patent leather shoes. He's probably Italian. His hair's slicked back. He may even go so far as to dye the
greying streaks on the side so he looks Italian and virile. He may even be working in a pizza place with a cocktail lounge on the side -- and he
strums the chords in all sorts of bizarre inversions to make it sound really 'modren'. What he's actually playing is no better than a cowboy music
chord progression. And the piano player does his best to play more notes per bar than is necessary to make the lyric come through. The drummer plays
as tastelessly as possible. All these effects were synthesized into the background of America Drinks And Goes Home. Then we carefully put together a
garble track of conversation to support all the music, if you'll allow that. The conversation was organized around stock lines that you'll hear
people saying in bars and night clubs across America. The girls all say to each other, 'Bennie, come with me to the bathroom'. And the boys all talk
about cars and ahh, older men talk about how they're going to go hunting or they talk about their jobs. Or they talk about the last time they went to
a convention. And we had all these stock lines that the people that were in the studio synthesized into crowd noises, were supposed to say and --.
You can't hear any of it of course, on the record, because you can only get so much onto the record when it begins to compete for your attention. And
you know as well as I do, boys and girls, you as an American has an attention span of probably not more than fifteen seconds. You've been brought up
that way, it's not your fault. I'm not tryin to make fun of ya or nothin. But we have to keep it so that there's one predominant idea out in front so
you can sort of follow a thread of what's going on.
Now we come to the question of specific electronic effects. I've been requested to explain to you how some of the noises we got on the Freak Out
album were manufactured. On the second disc of Freak Out we have a long tune which is called the Return of the Son of Monster Magnet. This was an
unfortunate incident. [clears throat] I'm still a little bit angry that the company did not allow me to finish the composition. What you hear on the
album is the rhythm track - that is, just like the basic foundation for a piece of music that was never completed. Y'know they -- I don't see how
they could take it upon themselves to release an incompleted piece. But they did and a number of people have come up to me and said how wonderful it
is. But I think it's really crappy and I'll tell you how we made it sound that way.
The rhythm consists of one set of drums and [cues song]
6:
FZ: mmm about five hundred dollars worth of rented percussion equipment. The five -- the rental of five hundred dollars was for one night. They had
the whole room full of all different kinds of drums and had about a couple hundred people in the room and I just said, 'Bang on the drums and do what
ya want.' And we recorded a great deal of this type of sound. Sort of spontaneous hokum. Then this was listened to, sifted through, the choicest
noises were picked out, edited together and superimposed on the basic rhythm track with the drums with a little knob, two or three oscillators, with
sounds played inside of a grand piano, dropping things on the strings of the piano, plucking, smashing, grunting, bashing, i don't know -- noise.
That was all assembled to be ... the first -- the first half of the composition. The second half was built mainly on vocal sounds modified by
changing the speed of the tape and different equilization characteristics. [song ends]
7:
FZ: Which is to say, equilization is uhhh an electronic dealie whereby you can emphasize certain frequencies of uhh a voice or an instrument or a type
of sound. It's like the bass and treble controls on your amplifier or your hi-fi set except in the studio you have the capability of emphasizing
certain frequencies. If you were, let's say to emphasize the 500 cycle component of a given sound uhh, if you emphasize the 500 cycle on a voice, the
voice tends to become fat and blurry. If however, you're boosting the voice at 4000 cycles it will become crisp. It is also conceivable that if you
boosted these -- both of these components at the same time you might have a fat, blurry, crisp voice. We do not ahh, have a great deal of money to
experiment around with all the possibilities for studio usage, right now. But one of these days when we get rich, we'll be able to go into a studio
and grab a hold of every knob we can get our hands on and turn them all and see what they will do to the sound of normal instruments and to the sound
of voices.
8:
FZ: Within the scope of our limited teenage budget, we have managed to make unusual sounds out of your everyday household variety human voices and uhh
rock and roll instruments. It is uhh possible to mangle the sound of uhh - any -- anything in the studio. You can take for instance, the sound of a
voice and by using the device known as a filter, instead of boosting certain acoustical components of the voice you can eliminate them. Filters chop
sounds out. If you were to filter a voice at 750 cycles, which is to say all sound below 750 is removed, you get the effect of a cardboard voice.
Sort of like what Paul McCartney got on one of those songs on uhhh the Revolver album. I forget which one -- I think, "Within You and without You".
No, that's not it. I don't know what I'm talking about. Well anyway, I never listen to the Beatles. But he did this one where he sounds like there's
this little weasely voice in the background and it's a filtered voice. And ahh a more simplified version of the technique is to be heard in uhhh
"Winchester Cathedral" where it sounds like megaphone a-go-go. Another thing you can do to enhance the sound of the human voice to absurdity -- ahh,
I've used this on our new album which will be out in about four weeks, you take a plastic coffee cup such as the one sitting before me and you punch
the bottom of it out and you stick your mouth on the end that you just punched out. Use that as a megaphone and sing or speak very slightly and it
gets the CRAPpiest sound you can imagine and makes your voice sound like -- well, we don't sing too hot anyway, but some of the effects we were able
to achieve with a plastic coffee cup and the right sort of knob turning in the control room -- well, we really came up with some unusual sound, let me
tell you. Also, the electronic effects present on the third album, which, in case you're interested is entitled 'We're Only In It For The Money' get
very intriguing at times. One piece on this album called 'The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny' was constructed by -- Oh, here's a coffee cup
somebody's gonna let me demo-- Oh Here's a good one, [thru the cup]-- 'Winchester Cathedral, doo-do-do, too doo' ... this isn't the best kinda mic to
use for this. You need a Sony mic. They really do a good number. Here we have some dismal RCA microphone. It's probably not a very spiffy one at
all. You know how those big companies are. [thru the cup] 'dat-dah-ta-dot Dahhh -- doo-dooh-dah-ta-dot Dahh' - just like Duane Eddy.
'Doot-dah-ta-dot-dahh'. Enough of that.
On The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny, we began by creating what you'd call your basic blerch track. The blerch track was constrcuted by
setting up in the studio two Norman microphones and a pile of musical instruments, drums, chairs, music stands, sticks, uhh, wastebaskets, anything
that we could our hands on that would make a noise if you hit it or kicked it over or did something. We put it in a pile in the middle of the room
and then very carefully went out there and kicked things over. Building up piles of stuff and knocking it over, beating on individual ahhh pieces of
equipment. Shuffling our feet and just making random sounds. While we were doing this, the engineer was controlling the speed of the tape with a
device known as a VFO which is a Variable Frequency Oscillator. This controls the voltage to the tape recorder which in turn controls the speed of
the tape moving past the heads. If you speed the tape up as it goes past the heads, the sound of the material on the tape when played back at normal
speed will appear to be lower in pitch. And conversely, if you slow the tape down while you're recording it, the stuff comes out sounding higher.
Well, what he was doing was varying the speed constantly during the time we were kicking these things over. So, you'd get these strange effects where
a pile of garbage is struck, begins to fall and as it falls it sort of goes into slow motion and as the things begin to settle on the floor and stop
rolling around the speed suddenly becomes very high pitched. We made approximately twenty minutes of this sort of background information. [coughs]
Pardon me. This particular information was then subjected to a series of modifications.
Modification One consisted of playing the tape backwards and adding to it what you'd call you're tape delay reverb. We call this the Dreamland
Reverberator at the studio and what it is, is a means of feeding back the original signal onto the uhh another tape and then back onto the original
tape so it -- you multiply the number of sounds being heard. It's like an echo repeat and the number of echo repeats can be varied and the speed at
which the repeats will occur can also be varied. We had a very slow echo repeat on our blerch track. But because we played the blerch track
backwards while we were putting the echo on it a strange thing occurs. Now, see if you can follow this. It gets a little bit involved here. You
have your original material on the tape. You play it backwards and you add a tape delay. That means as a sound is hit backwards you got these
repeats trailing off it. Now when you play that forwards what you get is a series of anticipations creeping down onto each initial pulse. Instead of
the echo following the note, the echo would precede the note or the noise as it was in this case.
We then took the echo'd tape and filtered it ... at random through a device known as a Poltek [?] filter. You have two knobs. One knob controls the
filtering of the low frequencies and the other knob controls the filtering of the high frequencies. The knob on the bottom reads from 50 cycles on up
to 2000 cycles. The knob on the top reads from I think it's 15000 cycles down to 1500 cycles. If you turn these knobs at random you are chopping out
at random certain components of the noises which are on the tape. When you make the transfer to another tape and what comes on -- what is present on
the other tape when you are done is a filtered version of the original. Got that kids? Ok. We now have a filtered blerch tape.
Now in recording you have a factor known as distortion. Distortion is something that happens when what you're putting on the tape is too loud for
what the tape is capable of handling and what it sounds like is noise. Real garbled nonsense. We created from our initial blerch track which was
labeled for laboratory convenience 'Sock Hop', we created a sort of rhythm track for the rest of this piece. The piece in general consists of ahh six
tracks of woodwind instruments, five tracks of piano, and four tracks of laugh. That's a human voice laughing in very strange ways. This is the voice
of the engineer. We had to get him into the act because he was a good laugher. This was all accompanied by the blerch track.
The way we did this -- this was done on a twelve-track machine by the way at Apostolic Studios on Tenth Street in New York -- we had the woodwind,
piano, laugh material on several tracks and as we were mixing it down we're adding to it this blerch track. And the way we do this is, you have these
things called faders which are volume controls which control the sound of the different tracks that are going to -- that are being combined onto a
piece of quarter-inch tape. A little skinny piece of tape that's easy to carry around with ya. Now these faders are supposed to be adjusted so that
the volume going onto the tape does not exceed a certain point. If you exceed that certain point, one, you will never be able to get it onto a disc
and two, you probably won't ever be able to recognize it because it will be completely distorted. Well, we ignored this rule.
The volume at which we ahh we re-recorded the blerch track was set at piercing. And there are switches right by the fader which -- it's like an on
and off switch. If you turn the switch one way, the fader is engaged. And you can slide it up and down or back and forth and that - that will adjust
the volume of the material that you're re-recording. But if the switch above the fader is in the off position, the fader is not operative. Got that?
OK. After we start the tape running along we begin with the faders in the OFF position. That means although our source tape for -- of the blerch
track is rolling along, nothing is heard. See? Simultaneously we are playing back the twelve-tracks of woodwinds, piano and voice.
[Edited on 30-10-10 by punknaynowned]
[Edited on 30-10-10 by punknaynowned]
[Edited on 30-10-10 by punknaynowned]
[Edited on 30-10-10 by punknaynowned]
[Edited on 30-10-10 by punknaynowned]
[Edited on 31-10-10 by punknaynowned]
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punknaynowned
Frank Zappa Status
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there's one more section to this just under 8 minutes
I'll try to finish it tonight.
Looking at this and how big it seems, especially the last one, maybe I should break it up into paragraphs. For greater ease in reading eh?
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punknaynowned
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ah and by the way, part of this can be heard on MOFO disc 4 track 10. This will be the complete interview that that audio is
excerpted from. So soon you'll be able to read the whole thing.
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punknaynowned
Frank Zappa Status
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there that looks better and some glaring mess ups and typos fixed
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punknaynowned
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9.
FZ: Oh, OK. I got a note here that says 'We gotta go soon. Let's do a few socio-political questions, NOW'. OK buddy. Whip it on me.
Interviewer: OK Frank. What do you think of America's bizarre new subculture the hippies.
Other Voice: Tell us about 'em.
Interviewer: Cause for alarm or approval?
FZ: Well, one thing that I've found about the hippies is that they're really not bizarre at all. I don't think anybody really knows what bizarre
means yet. [long pause] Other than that, the hippies are fun to watch.
Interviewer: Do you agree with 'Do Your Thing?'
FZ: Yeah, I agree with Do Your Thing but the trouble is that the hippies don't do anything except sit around. If that's their thing. I don't know
whether that's cause for approval or what. What do you think buddy?
Int: heheh Do Your Thing.
FZ: If the thing is picking your nose, how do you make judgements about that? Do you judge the quality of what comes out of your nose? That's about
the level of criticism that we're on.
Other Voice: Well, they said the hippie movement is dead. They had the death of the hippie in San Francisco and I don't know if that's true or not
but do you think -- what do you think's gonna follow this? Do you think they're gonna go back to Davy Crockett hats or -- or what's it
FZ: Oh, I don't know --
Other voice: Nothin? Any ideas?
FZ: No. I don't care either.
[long pause]
Interview: Do you think the hippies have had an effect on changing the media in this country?
FZ: Absolutely. When you can see dress shops selling their product using the word 'psychedelic', you can believe that the hippies have had a great
deal of influence ... on America ... today.
Interviewer: Do you think that this influence has been for the better? Such as Top 40 radio changing their format.
FZ: Do you think hippies have changed the format of Top 40 radio?
Interviewer: No, money has but the market has changed,
FZ: I don't see that. I still see the bulk of programming on Top 40 radio as y'know the same hokum that it was when I was listening to it a million
years ago.
Other voice: Do you think the Mothers of Invention will ever have a hit?
FZ: Yeah, in about four weeks. [laughter] Be serious, would you?
OV: Well, you're releasing it aren't you?
FZ: Mm-hmm
OV: Ok. We got a question from the control room. Believe it or not. They want to know in the control room what you think of LBJ.
FZ: I want to know ... why that would be a question that somebody would ask ya if you're a musician.
Int: I have no idea.
FZ: Why does anybody want to know what I think about a buffoon?
Int: huh
FZ: I think he'd make a great fat cowboy. He should be a uhh, sort of like a -- Connect it. If we were making a low budget western movie I would
cast Lyndon Johnson as a shifty bartender.
Int: Huh! What do you have to say about the dope scene?
FZ: I don't know anything about the dope scene because I don't use any dope. And all I know about the dope scene is most of the people that I see
involved in it turn out to be ahhh -- Now see I from time to time I get a chance to watch people in the whole evolution from ahh starting out with
the -- ahhh -- there's one famous person that I'm thinking of in particular that started out as what you'd call your jovial alchoholic. And went on
to bigger and better numbers. Went to pot and then went to LSD and now is babbling around -- is spreading the gospel of love and truth and he's
making a complete idiot out of himself. Poor fella.
And then what happened?
Int: heheh
[someone is leaving]
FZ: OK. Bye then.
Other voice*: Frank, Could I ask you a question? Do you know if there was a problem with the sound of or what the problems was the sound or with the
recordings or if
FZ: No, I learned about that part in my time with the Mothers. I had a recording studio,
OV*: Oh
FZ: Y'know, like I've learned -- Electronics, ahhh, as applied to what we're doing now is a growing field. Studios are becoming equipped with more
specialized equipment as the demand arises for this equipment.
I mean all these knobs and buttons are obviously expensive things and most studios won't go ahead and install specialized equipment unless they think
there's really a need for it. Now that the groups are becoming more interested in electronic music the studios are being equipped more
extensively.
OV*: Yeah it'll -- the same'll influence it some more by being available --
FZ: Sure, it's available and the one thing that seems to be prevalent in the pop music scene today -- there's a lot of curiosity among the young
people involved about sound, the nature of sound and ah, what can ya do with it and ah how, y'know? They want to know, they want to learn, but they,
they don't have access to the proper tools to find out.
OV*: Mm-hmm,
FZ: For instance, Micky Dolenz has a Moogsynthesizer but he doesn't know what the fuck to do with it.
OV*: So he's experimenting? [?]
FZ: Well, he is but he ...[garbled]... doesn't have the practical skill to manipulate the instrument. Like at this studio that we've been working at
in New York, I think I've got 'em talked into installing a device that's called a Double Ring Modulator. That's it which -- no fooling -- pumping the
voice into it. And the voice is modulated , effected by a signal emitted by either an oscillator or another instrument or another voice. Y'know, one
sound source modifies the output of the first sound source. Two plugs going in and one plug going out. The sound that comes out is a product of -,
let's say that you're singing a note into the modulator that's a thousand cycles and you're feeding a tone into the modulator from an oscillator
that's 300 cycles, the output of the device is a -- the sum of the two tones, 1300 cycles and also, uhh, 700 cycles which is also a thousand minus
300. You can have a thousand, seven hundred and thirteen hundred. That gives you an arbitrarily formed chord. As you sing and your pitch goes up
and down, the 300 cycle thing going remains the same and these ratios change and all these chords change and the sound
OV*: the 300 cycle acts like, acts as a pedal pump
FZ: No you don't even hear that
OV*: Ohh, really?
FZ: Yeah. You can hear it. You can turn it on and make it ahh evident in the product of what's coming out but you don't really -- you'll have the
initial signal and the product signals
OV*: Oh, I see. OK.
FZ: The result with a human voice is a sound that is a cross between chimes, bells and a buzzsaw
OV*: Mm
FZ: Only as chords. Now this device is available for about 635 dollars from Moog equipment.
OV*: Is -- is anyone else using that?
FZ: Not in rock and roll -- or even in pop music. That's a good reason you don't have electronic compositions and they don't have a sense the effect
that electronic signals have.
* this sounds a lot like the woman that would be in Uncle Meat, Phyllis Altenhaus. I guess we'll never know.
[Edited on 30-10-10 by punknaynowned]
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DED
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tnx I will add this part as soon as possible.
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DED
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done
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punknaynowned
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Thank YOU Ed!!!! But Oh! I'm so sorry! I fixed the portion of 1- 8 again with several fixes on Sunday that didn't make it to the page. hahahha your
new 'Mood' makes me laugh. I would do it, make the fixes but I don't know how.
There are two more of these interview radio shows that I have wanted to do.
Both are from 1968 and both have not been written out anywhere else (as far as I know).
I wanted to do the Studs Terkel interview also from 1968 but that's already on the net.
The two I'd like to do have a lot of music and I thought of putting youtube links or even amazon links to give a sample of the music. But it occurred
that might cause problems. Not linking across the ocean or other problems.
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DED
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do not mind the linking. The goose is hosted at godaddy in the us.
Send in your portion of 1-8 again.
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punknaynowned
Frank Zappa Status
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Ok! I edited it in the post above, but can happily repost
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punknaynowned
Frank Zappa Status
Posts: 1283
Registered: 29-8-2006
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
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1967 11 13 WDET FM Detroit, MI
1.
FZ: Hello there. I have the Wayne State University Widget Guide for Radio, TV Quarterly, Fall 1967. And golly it's a thrilling little book. It's one
of the , it's one of your better Detroit publications. and I was gonna read some of it to ya. I'm gonna read the best parts of it because I wouldn't
want to waste your time. On the inside page, -- actually it's the inside back cover, but it might as well be page 65 of this thrilling booklet, we
have a chart which is headed up by a little caption. Many charts have captions here in Detroit. This one says, 'Radio is the most visual medium'.
Well, we know that's a lie. But that's what they have on the chart. That's what you call your packaging myth. Now this here chart, says, at the top,
'WHPR 88.1, WSHJ 88.3, CKWW 88.7, WAOK sounds like a country and western station 89.3, WDTR 9-oh-.9, WPHS 91.5, WOUM, nine-oh, WUOM, WOUM would sound
like some sort of part of your body wouldn't it? huh-huh-huh even here in Detroit they have those things. It's 91.7. and the chart goes on all the way
down to 107.5. Now this would indicate that these are probably places on your dial where you might tune in to get information. And I would imagine
that the bulk of this book concerns itself with what you'd call your radio entertainment on an FM level. Here are some of the things they got to offer
ya. For instance, Wednesday, November first, eh-heh, bet you can hardly wait for that, six-thirty pm they have a dynamite show called About Science
and then seven o'clock they have a show called The City. At seven-thirty pm they have The Guest Lecture. Can you hardly wait? Well, I knew you'd be
excited about that. This is the Public Opinion Foreign Policy and the Historian Lecture featuring Harold Isaacs, Center for International Studies,
MIT, 'Sources For Images of Foreign Countries'. Discussing would be Melvin Small of the Department of History of WSU. This promises to be a very
soulful program. Three o'clock in the afternoon they have what you would call your call classic matinee which is featuring these thrilling
compositions. Albinoni [?], Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra in D. That's a hot one. They're going so far as to play a piece of music by Aaron
Copeland, his piano quartet with the newer quartet. They're playing all kinds of thrilling things for ya. It's too bad you're too busy to listen to
that kinda stuff. Ah, what else have we got here? Oh, I know what they ought to do right now. They oughta play Who Are the Brain Police by the Mothers
of Invention album, Freak Out. Because I just found a picture in this magazine that's got a -- ewwhh, hoho, hey you guys really oughta get this
booklet. There's a picture toward the back of the book, going at the back of the book. Two people are naked. It shows a very twisted tree and both the
people that are standing here with no clothes on are pretty twisted too. The man is uncircumcised, shows his actual peepee hanging out. They'v gone
quite a ways with this illustration. I don't know why they would include it in the program guide. And the woman has a very protruding navel. Obviously
the artist who rendered this couple doesn't think too much of the human body.
2.
FZ: Who Are The Brain Police. [song plays]3:13
3.
FZ: Oh, wonderful!
interviewer: That's really beautiful Frank. And that makes me want to ask you a question.
FZ: That doesn't make you want to ask me a question. Expediency makes you want to ask me a question because you know we have to be out of here by
one-thirty.
int: yeah, you caught me again.
FZ: mm-hmm.
int: People have been writing many many letters to the radio station, and ahh
FZ: People don't really write letters, do they?
int: Sure they do. They write a lot of letters, to the radio station and they say, 'Can you please tell us, just how the Mothers of Invention make
their albums, cuz we want to know'. And the reason they ask that question is because they know you're coming to fill the other [all their?]
auditorium.
FZ: What an obvious, an obvious commercial hype. You sound like one of those guys that I met at the airport from the BFD company.
int: They're a bad company, but they put on good shows. So everyone's been saying 'why don't ya have Frank on and tell us how they do the albums. We
really want to know'.
FZ: Alright, I'll tell ya how we do the albums. First of all, when my schedule permits, I'll sit down and write out the songs that go in the albums.
Some day I'll, if umm, -- I know that I have a certain amount of material to turn out for a certain album. Like in one day I'll sit down and write
seven songs and the rest of 'em I'll write when they happen to occur to me. A lot of the material that we record dates back four or five years. Things
I wrote a long time ago that have already been recorded before at my studio in Cucamonga. For instance, Any Way The Wind Blows and a song that's going
to be on the third album called Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance were both recorded a long time ago and taken and shopped around the record
companies in Los Angeles. About four years ago and nobody was very interested in the material at that time. Even though the masters were of HIGH
QUALITY. Oh [sniffs] I guess that's just another indication that we have no future in show business. Now some of the technical problems involved in
getting our throbbing teen sounds onto the grooves you have to understand the problems involved with recording itself. There's a definite difference
between what music sounds like when played live, when recorded on tape and when recorded on disc and each medium has it's own acoustical problems.
Tape and disc have different tolerances as to how much volume can be put on. In live performance, your volume level is, ahhmm, determined basically by
the wattage of your amplifier and how long it takes before your ears start bleeding once you turn the amplifiers up. Some of what we do is very loud
in live performance and it's difficult to make it sound right when you put it on the tape. 'Cuz as soon as you start recording it the needle goes over
into the red and just lays there, sort of whimpering. And when you try and transfer that tape to disc you have more problems because they have to chop
the top off. The highs, the high frequencies and they cut all the low frequencies off and leave the middle of what's left. And sometimes I'm very
disappointed when I listen to what we play when I hear it on records. Because it doesn't sound like what we play. But I suppose that's what ya have to
put up with. Let's take for instance, a song like America Drinks and Goes Home from our second album Absolutely Free. And I suppose that -- hmmm? No,
I'm looking at the guy in the control room and he's sticking his finger in the air and smiling and doing all kinds of bizarre numbers in there. Which
would indicate that he is probably, maybe even possibly, maybe he's considered that it might be a good time to play that tune, so that we could
discuss it. But he can't do it because I'm holding the record. Oh!
4.
[song, America Drinks plays] 2:32
5.
FZ: Oh! swell. Now I'll tell you what's in that tune. First of all, the chord changes are a satire on the -- ohh, typical set of chord changes used
for all songs of that type from the beginning of time up to now. uhh, I don't know whether or not if you can really imagine a parody of a set of chord
changes but that's what's in it. The chord changes amount to a series of 2-5-1's rotating around the circle of fifths. Our parody consists of instead
of going around the circle of fifths like the old folks used to do, we made the 2-5-1's go in funny directions where they wouldn't normally go. It's a
little bit more adventurous chord progression than the normal - ahh stock ballad chord progression. The words are just about as putrid as I could make
them and from there we had to decide on a proper musical performance for this ditty. Chose the medium of the cocktail piano accompanied by strummed
guitar. The way that guitar players used to play it in bar's that I worked in as a youth. The guitar player sits on a stool wearing a tux-coat and
bowtie. He wears black patent leather shoes. He's probably Italian. His hair's slicked back. He may even go so far as to dye the greying streaks on
the side so he looks Italian and virile. He may even be working in a pizza place with a cocktail lounge on the side -- and he strums the chords in all
sorts of bizarre inversions to make it sound really 'modren'. What he's actually playing is no better than a cowboy music chord progression. And the
piano player does his best to play more notes per bar than is necessary to make the lyric come through. The drummer plays as tastelessly as possible.
All these effects were synthesized into the background of America Drinks And Goes Home. Then we carefully put together a garble track of conversation
to support all the music, if you'll allow that. The conversation was organized around stock lines that you'll hear people saying in bars and night
clubs across America. The girls all say to each other, 'Bennie, come with me to the bathroom'. And the boys all talk about cars and ahh, older men
talk about how they're going to go hunting or they talk about their jobs. Or they talk about the last time they went to a convention. And we had all
these stock lines that the people that were in the studio synthesized into crowd noises, were supposed to say and --. You can't hear any of it of
course, on the record, because you can only get so much onto the record when it begins to compete for your attention. And you know as well as I do,
boys and girls, you as an American has an attention span of probably not more than fifteen seconds. You've been brought up that way, it's not your
fault. I'm not tryin to make fun of ya or nothin. But we have to keep it so that there's one predominant idea out in front so you can sort of follow a
thread of what's going on.
Now we come to the question of specific electronic effects. I've been requested to explain to you how some of the noises we got on the Freak Out album
were manufactured. On the second disc of Freak Out we have a long tune which is called the Return of the Son of Monster Magnet. This was an
unfortunate incident. [clears throat] I'm still a little bit angry that the company did not allow me to finish the composition. What you hear on the
album is the rhythm track - that is, just like the basic foundation for a piece of music that was never completed. Y'know they -- I don't see how they
could take it upon themselves to release an incompleted piece. But they did and a number of people have come up to me and said how wonderful it is.
But I think it's really crappy and I'll tell you how we made it sound that way.
The rhythm consists of one set of drums and [cues song]
6:
FZ: mmm about five hundred dollars worth of rented percussion equipment. The five -- the rental of five hundred dollars was for one night. They had
the whole room full of all different kinds of drums and had about a couple hundred people in the room and I just said, 'Bang on the drums and do what
ya want.' And we recorded a great deal of this type of sound. Sort of spontaneous hokum. Then this was listened to, sifted through, the choicest
noises were picked out, edited together and superimposed on the basic rhythm track with the drums with a little knob, two or three oscillators, with
sounds played inside of a grand piano, dropping things on the strings of the piano, plucking, smashing, grunting, bashing, i don't know -- noise. That
was all assembled to be ... the first -- the first half of the composition. The second half was built mainly on vocal sounds modified by changing the
speed of the tape and different equilization characteristics. [song ends]
7:
FZ: Which is to say, equilization is uhhh an electronic dealie whereby you can emphasize certain frequencies of uhh a voice or an instrument or a type
of sound. It's like the bass and treble controls on your amplifier or your hi-fi set except in the studio you have the capability of emphasizing
certain frequencies. If you were, let's say to emphasize the 500 cycle component of a given sound uhh, if you emphasize the 500 cycle on a voice, the
voice tends to become fat and blurry. If however, you're boosting the voice at 4000 cycles it will become crisp. It is also conceivable that if you
boosted these -- both of these components at the same time you might have a fat, blurry, crisp voice. We do not ahh, have a great deal of money to
experiment around with all the possibilities for studio usage, right now. But one of these days when we get rich, we'll be able to go into a studio
and grab a hold of every knob we can get our hands on and turn them all and see what they will do to the sound of normal instruments and to the sound
of voices.
8:
FZ: Within the scope of our limited teenage budget, we have managed to make unusual sounds out of your everyday household variety human voices and uhh
rock and roll instruments. It is uhh possible to mangle the sound of uhh - any -- anything in the studio. You can take for instance, the sound of a
voice and by using the device known as a filter, instead of boosting certain acoustical components of the voice you can eliminate them. Filters chop
sounds out. If you were to filter a voice at 750 cycles, which is to say all sound below 750 is removed, you get the effect of a cardboard voice. Sort
of like what Paul McCartney got on one of those songs on uhhh the Revolver album. I forget which one -- I think, "Within You and without You". No,
that's not it. I don't know what I'm talking about. Well anyway, I never listen to the Beatles. But he did this one where he sounds like there's this
little weasely voice in the background and it's a filtered voice. And ahh a more simplified version of the technique is to be heard in uhhh
"Winchester Cathedral" where it sounds like megaphone a-go-go. Another thing you can do to enhance the sound of the human voice to absurdity -- ahh,
I've used this on our new album which will be out in about four weeks, you take a plastic coffee cup such as the one sitting before me and you punch
the bottom of it out and you stick your mouth on the end that you just punched out. Use that as a megaphone and sing or speak very slightly and it
gets the CRAPpiest sound you can imagine and makes your voice sound like -- well, we don't sing too hot anyway, but some of the effects we were able
to achieve with a plastic coffee cup and the right sort of knob turning in the control room -- well, we really came up with some unusual sound, let me
tell you. Also, the electronic effects present on the third album, which, in case you're interested is entitled 'We're Only In It For The Money' get
very intriguing at times. One piece on this album called 'The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny' was constructed by -- Oh, here's a coffee cup
somebody's gonna let me demo-- Oh Here's a good one, [thru the cup]-- 'Winchester Cathedral, doo-do-do, too doo' ... this isn't the best kinda mic to
use for this. You need a Sony mic. They really do a good number. Here we have some dismal RCA microphone. It's probably not a very spiffy one at all.
You know how those big companies are. [thru the cup] 'dat-dah-ta-dot Dahhh -- doo-dooh-dah-ta-dot Dahh' - just like Duane Eddy.
'Doot-dah-ta-dot-dahh'. Enough of that.
On The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny, we began by creating what you'd call your basic blerch track. The blerch track was constrcuted by setting
up in the studio two Norman microphones and a pile of musical instruments, drums, chairs, music stands, sticks, uhh, wastebaskets, anything that we
could our hands on that would make a noise if you hit it or kicked it over or did something. We put it in a pile in the middle of the room and then
very carefully went out there and kicked things over. Building up piles of stuff and knocking it over, beating on individual ahhh pieces of equipment.
Shuffling our feet and just making random sounds. While we were doing this, the engineer was controlling the speed of the tape with a device known as
a VFO which is a Variable Frequency Oscillator. This controls the voltage to the tape recorder which in turn controls the speed of the tape moving
past the heads. If you speed the tape up as it goes past the heads, the sound of the material on the tape when played back at normal speed will appear
to be lower in pitch. And conversely, if you slow the tape down while you're recording it, the stuff comes out sounding higher. Well, what he was
doing was varying the speed constantly during the time we were kicking these things over. So, you'd get these strange effects where a pile of garbage
is struck, begins to fall and as it falls it sort of goes into slow motion and as the things begin to settle on the floor and stop rolling around the
speed suddenly becomes very high pitched. We made approximately twenty minutes of this sort of background information. [coughs] Pardon me. This
particular information was then subjected to a series of modifications.
Modification One consisted of playing the tape backwards and adding to it what you'd call you're tape delay reverb. We call this the Dreamland
Reverberator at the studio and what it is, is a means of feeding back the original signal onto the uhh another tape and then back onto the original
tape so it -- you multiply the number of sounds being heard. It's like an echo repeat and the number of echo repeats can be varied and the speed at
which the repeats will occur can also be varied. We had a very slow echo repeat on our blerch track. But because we played the blerch track backwards
while we were putting the echo on it a strange thing occurs. Now, see if you can follow this. It gets a little bit involved here. You have your
original material on the tape. You play it backwards and you add a tape delay. That means as a sound is hit backwards you got these repeats trailing
off it. Now when you play that forwards what you get is a series of anticipations creeping down onto each initial pulse. Instead of the echo following
the note, the echo would precede the note or the noise as it was in this case.
We then took the echo'd tape and filtered it ... at random through a device known as a Poltek [?] filter. You have two knobs. One knob controls the
filtering of the low frequencies and the other knob controls the filtering of the high frequencies. The knob on the bottom reads from 50 cycles on up
to 2000 cycles. The knob on the top reads from I think it's 15000 cycles down to 1500 cycles. If you turn these knobs at random you are chopping out
at random certain components of the noises which are on the tape. When you make the transfer to another tape and what comes on -- what is present on
the other tape when you are done is a filtered version of the original. Got that kids? Ok. We now have a filtered blerch tape.
Now in recording you have a factor known as distortion. Distortion is something that happens when what you're putting on the tape is too loud for what
the tape is capable of handling and what it sounds like is noise. Real garbled nonsense. We created from our initial blerch track which was labeled
for laboratory convenience 'Sock Hop', we created a sort of rhythm track for the rest of this piece. The piece in general consists of ahh six tracks
of woodwind instruments, five tracks of piano, and four tracks of laugh. That's a human voice laughing in very strange ways. This is the voice of the
engineer. We had to get him into the act because he was a good laugher. This was all accompanied by the blerch track.
The way we did this -- this was done on a twelve-track machine by the way at Apostolic Studios on Tenth Street in New York -- we had the woodwind,
piano, laugh material on several tracks and as we were mixing it down we're adding to it this blerch track. And the way we do this is, you have these
things called faders which are volume controls which control the sound of the different tracks that are going to -- that are being combined onto a
piece of quarter-inch tape. A little skinny piece of tape that's easy to carry around with ya. Now these faders are supposed to be adjusted so that
the volume going onto the tape does not exceed a certain point. If you exceed that certain point, one, you will never be able to get it onto a disc
and two, you probably won't ever be able to recognize it because it will be completely distorted. Well, we ignored this rule.
The volume at which we ahh we re-recorded the blerch track was set at piercing. And there are switches right by the fader which -- it's like an on and
off switch. If you turn the switch one way, the fader is engaged. And you can slide it up and down or back and forth and that - that will adjust the
volume of the material that you're re-recording. But if the switch above the fader is in the off position, the fader is not operative. Got that? OK.
After we start the tape running along we begin with the faders in the OFF position. That means although our source tape for -- of the blerch track is
rolling along, nothing is heard. See? Simultaneously we are playing back the twelve-tracks of woodwinds, piano and voice.
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DED
Administrator
Posts: 1139
Registered: 16-3-2006
Location: NL
Member Is Offline
Mood: a happy upgrader feeling
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Changed it in the interview section Tnx.
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