Frank Zappa. Guitarist.

eric-vaxxine

This is my favourite Zappa guitar instrumental and put it with
Hendrix's 'Have You Ever Been to Electric Ladyland' as my
two all time favourite guitar compositions.

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AlanRatcliffe

From the same album, Black Napkins is also a killer. The entire Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar set is brilliant.

Also this:
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joealien22

Watermelon in Easter Hay gets the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. In fact the whole Joes Garage album hugely influenced me. ?

AlanRatcliffe

Luc wrote: Watermelon in Easter Hay gets the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up.

There's also a great live version on Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar.

tiller

Unfortunately, the first video is no longer available. ☹
But speaking of Frank Zappa, he was one those guitar players who played with the taste. This is the mastery to me in music ?

Bob-Dubery

Excellent player. I don't know about tasteful, one of the things about Zappa was that he could play marvellously distastefully (which, I suppose, is a taste in way). Very versatile player, high degree of musical knowledge. Oddly it seems to have taken a while for his skills as a guitarist to have been recognised - maybe because he was more interested in the composition and overall effect than in being a guitar hero. Or maybe he was being lauded as a genius player all along and it was only when I had enough money to buy magazines regularly that I noticed the critical acclaim.

Also one of those guys who knew how to put a band together. That's an underappreciated skill IMO.

AlanRatcliffe

Oh, he could be tasteful ...when he wanted to be, but he regarded soloing as being something that should be visceral.

While he described himself as "a composer who happens to be able to operate the instrument called a guitar", he's been regarded as a guitar "hero" since the late '60s (Hot Rats in '69 really cemented it). However, he's not always the easiest player to grok - he's a player's player and the more you learn, the more depth and jaw-dropping complexity you find in his playing (usually hidden behind gnarly tones that repel most casual listeners).

Good example:
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What really set him apart was the polar opposites of his precise compositions on one side and his wild abandon while soloing.

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Dweezil said it best, something like: "you don't get players of that calibre to play for you unless you are a monster of a player yourself". And if you look at the list of players who happily played "second fiddle" to him (Vai, Belew, Kenealley, Cucurullo, White, et. al.) it tells an impressive story...

chris77

There was a nice feature in last months Classic Rock magazine about Zappa. In it he is quoted as having said that he is a composer and that a composer's job is to force his will on air molecules, often with the help of unsuspecting musicians. ? Brilliant!
Also, I always thought that with him living and making music in the era that he did, naming his children Moon and Dweezil and creating the kind music that he did, that he would have been more than just a cassual user of the popular drugs of the day. But apparently - apart from smoking a few joints once and feeling sick afterwards - he never touched the stuff. So ja, another lesson for me to not judge a book by his cover.

Chabenda

What was his quirky comment that went something like "My asshole - it's killing me"?

AlanRatcliffe

chris77 wrote: But apparently - apart from smoking a few joints once and feeling sick afterwards - he never touched the stuff.

Grounds for instant dismissal from his band...

"A drug is neither moral nor immoral -- it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole." - FZ

On the Kid's names:
"People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly 'strange names', but the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it is the last name that is going to get them in trouble." - FZ

Interestingly, Dweezil's birth name was Calvin Euclid - the birth registrar refused to enter Dweezil as a name, so Frank and Gail named him Calvin officially, but called him Dweezil. When Dweezil was older and found out his real name was Calvin, he was horrified and immediately changed it by deed poll to Dweezil.

Chabenda wrote: What was his quirky comment that went something like "My asshole - it's killing me"?

Not as far as I know, but makes sense if he was referring to his prostate cancer...

eric-vaxxine

we've gone off topic a bit....makes me think we could exchange
and explore at length with a new thread - All about Frank.

Back to Zappa, the guitarist....
If my memory serves me well, he admitted to not being
very good playing rhythm guitar.