“I always described it as the battle between the chicken and the spider. It’s not a comfortable way to play”: Dweezil Zappa on his father’s strange guitar playing style
If you’ve ever tried to copy Frank Zappa’s playing and ended up looking like a confused poultry wrangler, you’re not alone. According to his son Dweezil Zappa, the late icon’s technique was as eccentric as his compositions, and just as tough to replicate.
In a recent conversation with Marshall, the guitarist shares what made Frank’s playing style so unique and why despite growing up around it, he still struggles to nail it.
READ MORE: “He had very specific-looking hands – they looked different to other people’s”: Dweezil Zappa recalls the time Eddie Van Halen visited his family home and taught him guitar
“I always described it as the battle between the chicken and the spider,” Dweezil begins [via Ultimate Guitar]. “Because he had this real plucky way of playing, which I still can’t emulate, because it’s not a comfortable way to play. And he would play up close to the neck a lot, and then it would look like this: real plucky stuff happening. But this always looked like the chicken, that was like, trying to get some seeds or whatever.”
“So I would look at that stuff, and I would somehow make a mental note of what was going on. And then I would think, ‘One day I’ll learn to play this stuff. But not yet.’”
While one might assume growing up with Frank Zappa meant being force-fed experimental guitar licks at the dinner table, Dweezil reveals that on the contrary, his father didn’t think his own playing would be helpful for a young guitarist.
“When it was my own guitar playing, and he saw that I was interested in sticking with it, he played in such an idiosyncratic way, he didn’t really think that his playing style or technique was necessarily going to be helpful,” Dweezil says. “Because he played in such a quirky way.”
“So he thought, ‘Well, with the stuff that you’re interested in, maybe you should have Steve show you some stuff. And so Steve Vai [who was a member of Frank’s band at the time] showed me some stuff. Wrote down some pentatonic scales and some stuff like that, which – I still have that notebook. It has, like, four or five exercises and stuff. But he was only 21 or 22 at the time.”
Watch the full interview below.
The post “I always described it as the battle between the chicken and the spider. It’s not a comfortable way to play”: Dweezil Zappa on his father’s strange guitar playing style appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
