We Made Our Reputation Doing It That Way - Frank Zappa

which had.

.. .

Somewhere along the line, I had to teach them a lot of what

they didn’t know about music.

I started out playing rhythm &blues when I was about 14 or 15 years old in

San Diego.

And, uh.

.. I was playing nothing but blues 'til I was 18 and, you

know, I was really honking and I started out playing drums with a band and

got tired of listening to other people’s guitar solos.

Took up a guitar and

started playing lead right away.

Then I spent, uh.

.. the early part of my

musical teen childhood doing the same thing that most of the, uh.

.. uh,

white blues bands are, uh, pulling down heavy bread for.

But in those days it

was, you know.

.. it was the underground music, uh.

.. the unpopular

underground music because the kids, uh, then wanted to hear, uh.

.. you

know, sweeter, easier stuff.

They didn’t go for hard, screaming blues or

Chicago, uh, you know, weirdness.

Nobody knew who the Howlin' Wolf was,

nobody.

.. you know, Muddy Waters, what the fuck is that?

And, uh, so I

grew up on that stuff but simultaneously buying, uh, classical albums and,

uh, going to the library to study music.

I had albums of Stravinsky and

Varèse and Webern and Bartók.

And I never bought anything el.

.. I

never bought any Beethoven or, uh, Mozart or anything like that because

I didn’t like the way it sounded, it was too weak.

So.

.. eventually I started hearing a little folk music.

I didn’t like most of

the commercial folk music that was around.

My taste in folk music was, uh,

sea shanties and, uh.

.. uh, Middle Eastern stuff.

I like Indian music,

I like,

uh.

.. Arab music.

So, that.

.. that was all my own personal taste-making,

uh, influences.

The original guys in the band had been brought up on nothing but rhythm &

blues.

Now, rhythm &blues branches out into about four different categories

the way we grew up with it.

There was the ooh-wah ballad, you know, with

the high falsetto and the grunting bass and all that stuff.

That type.

There’s

a Chicago blues type with the harmonica and, you know, and the funky-ness.

There was a Texas type with a, you know.

.. rock, uh, Bobby, uh, «Blue»

Bland type thing.

And then there was the hard drive type James Brown shit.

And offshoots of the, uh.

.. of each one of those, like in the ooh-wah

classification you’ve got the uptempo singers where the.

.. like Hank

Ballard and the Midnighters and the Royales.

They had a different type of a

thing.

Uh.

.. all the other guys in the group grew up with just that and had no

knowledge whatsoever of any kind of classical music, uh, or serious music,

the.

.. uh, above and beyond Mozart or, uh, Beethoven or, you know,

standard concert hall, uh.

.. warhorses.

And even that, they didn’t give a

shit about and they weren’t interested at all in folk music.

And, uh.

.. so I

had quite a bit of trouble in the beginning, eh.

.. just making them aware

that there were other kinds of music that we could be playing.

To top it off,

we were in a, uh.

.. very sterile area.

We.

.. we kept getting fired because

we’d playing anything other than «Wooly Bully"or, uh. .. you know. .. uh,

«Twist and Shout"or the rest of that stuff. We’d lost job after job.

Interviewer:

When.

.. when is this that you’re talking about exactly?

FZ:

Two years ago.

Interviewer:

In '65?

FZ:

Yeah.

And, uh.

.. so it was.

.. it was rough keeping it together because

there’s lots of times that, uh.

.. the guys wanted to quit, I mean,

everybody’s quit at least 200 times.

So.

.. we finally got a chance to come

into L.A. and the reason we stood out from the bands in Los Angeles, you

know, why we would attract any attention at all at that point.

.. 'cuz, uh,

we were working out in the sticks, this whole thing was developing out, uh,

away from any, uh.

.. you know, any urban civilization.

We were really,

you know, just out there with the Okies.

And we got to town, we expected to find all kinds of, you know.

.. uh, all

the bands gotta be really far-out.

Well, they weren’t, they were bullshit and

they had no balls, you know, they weren’t funky, they weren’t, uh, tasteful,

they weren’t nothin'.

They were just, you know, plastic, folk-rock, teenage

puker bands.

And they were making a lot of bread.

And we came on the

scene.

.. and, uh, we were loud and we were coarse and we were strange

and if anybody in the audience ever gave us any trouble, we’d tell 'em to

fuck off.

And.

.. we made our reputation doing it that way