“They’re like, ‘I’m in the ballpark’”: Dweezil Zappa on the “laziness” of guitar players when covering songs like Eruption
Think you can play Eruption just because you hit a few tapped notes and land in the right key? Well, Dweezil Zappa’s not buying it.
The guitarist and son of late legend Frank Zappa speaks in a new interview with Marshall, where he calls out the “laziness” of those players who, in his view, cut corners when covering songs, especially the kind that shaped generations, like Eruption.
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
Reflecting on his own early guitar days, Dweezil recalls how Eddie Van Halen’s visit to his home “opened up the whole world of guitar playing” for him “just by being able to see it up close”.
This was “way before YouTube”, he says, when you couldn’t just Google a tutorial or slow something down in 4K. “You had to just imagine what this stuff was, you know. Or you had to have binoculars when you go to a concert and see it up close.”
Asked if this was the reason many guitar players from that era often “came up with their own versions of things”, Dweezil doesn’t exactly agree.
“There’s a lot of people that – and sometimes it just comes down to laziness – they’re like, ‘Well, I’ll just do my own thing.’ Because they hear enough of it, and they’re like, ‘I’m in the ballpark. I’ll just make my [own thing],’” he says.
“But to me, when I was learning songs, if it was Van Halen or if it was something that Randy Rhoads was playing, I didn’t feel like I was playing the song at all unless I played exactly what I heard them doing. And I wanted to learn the nuances. I wanted to try to get the sound. I wanted to do that. Because to me, that was the whole package of playing the song.”
“So when somebody says, ‘Hey, I can play Eruption, I’m like, ‘Great! Let me see it.’ And if it’s not what I heard on the record, then to me it’s not it,” Dweezil continues. “As a kid, that was the goal: to try and get as close as I could on any of that stuff, which is not easy. It’s been a lifelong obsession to learn how to play a lot of this kind of stuff.”
Elsewhere, Dweezil also opens up about his dad’s peculiar guitar playing style, calling it “the battle between the chicken and the spider”.
“It’s not a comfortable way to play,” he says.
The post “They’re like, ‘I’m in the ballpark’”: Dweezil Zappa on the “laziness” of guitar players when covering songs like Eruption appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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