"When I was 14 years old I made the decision that I was going to find and purchase every Frank Zappa record. In 1984, this took some doing since all of his records from the 60's and 70's were out of print. I would take buses all over L.A. and the Valley for these records, every one of which had a huge, powerful effect on me. Each one, upon finding it, would seem like the most perfect microcosm of feeling to me. Everything about each one, the smell, the cover, the inner sleeve and especially the music were pure magic to my mind. I also soon started regularly calling his 818 PUMPKIN, ordering stuff whenever I had money. This included the Old Masters box (which contained re-masters of his first 5 records), the film Baby Snakes and a video called The Dub Room Special. I watched these two videos over and over, constantly showing them to anyone willing to watch. By the time I was 15 I owned all of the records and was spending about 70% of my muscial life studying and learning his music. For me, striving for the perfection he was known for demanding from his bands was a powerful motivation and force behind the huge amount of practicing I was doing back then. I taught myself to read music by comparing the written notes in The Frank Zappa Guitar Book to the recordings of those songs. The poly-rhythms in that book (brilliantly transcribed by Steve Vai), as well as those in his instrumental compositions, opened up my mind a great deal. I believe this instilled in my brain the wide open, infinite possibilities of creating shapes with music."
Frusciante Playing Inca Roads
Reviewed by
frank zappa newspaper
on
04:17
Rating:
5
"When I was 14 years old I made the decision that I was going to find and purchase every Frank Zappa record. In 1984, this took some doing since all of his records from the 60's and 70's were out of print. I would take buses all over L.A. and the Valley for these records, every one of which had a huge, powerful effect on me. Each one, upon finding it, would seem like the most perfect microcosm of feeling to me. Everything about each one, the smell, the cover, the inner sleeve and especially the music were pure magic to my mind. I also soon started regularly calling his 818 PUMPKIN, ordering stuff whenever I had money. This included the Old Masters box (which contained re-masters of his first 5 records), the film Baby Snakes and a video called The Dub Room Special. I watched these two videos over and over, constantly showing them to anyone willing to watch. By the time I was 15 I owned all of the records and was spending about 70% of my muscial life studying and learning his music. For me, striving for the perfection he was known for demanding from his bands was a powerful motivation and force behind the huge amount of practicing I was doing back then. I taught myself to read music by comparing the written notes in The Frank Zappa Guitar Book to the recordings of those songs. The poly-rhythms in that book (brilliantly transcribed by Steve Vai), as well as those in his instrumental compositions, opened up my mind a great deal. I believe this instilled in my brain the wide open, infinite possibilities of creating shapes with music."
Reviewed by
frank zappa newspaper
on
04:17
Rating:
good adventure
ReplyDeleteAwesome read!
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