Zappa Lives Again

“To all those people who say Frank would never want to do this, I would say you might want to go back to your Frank history and read chapter 18 of The Real Frank Zappa Book.”

“People, I hope, will be asking themselves constantly, ‘What the fuck is going on?’” says Ahmet Zappa. Twentysix years after the death of Frank Zappa, his youngest son Ahmet is bringing Frank back to the stage in The Bizarre World Of Frank Zappa. Ahmet, co-trustee of the Zappa Family Trust, has joined forces with Eyellusion, the company behind the Ronnie James Dio hologram tour, to design a new stage show celebrating his father’s music.

The music for The Bizarre World Of Frank Zappa was created using never-released footage that Zappa shot in 1974. It was drummer Joe Travers, the Vaultmeister in charge of cataloguing the extensive Zappa archives, who first made Ahmet aware of the material. “He mentioned, ‘Oh yeah, there’s this rehearsal that Frank shot right after the Roxy,’” says Ahmet. “There’s the whole Roxy film debacle where they lost sync with the sound, so Frank