WHEN FRANK ZAPPA SHUT UP ’N STOPPED PLAYING GUITAR
The opening frame of Alex Winter’s 2020 intimate-portrait “biopic” documentary, Zappa, shows Frank Zappa onstage at the Sports Hall in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1991 holding the Stratocaster you see on the cover of The Guitar World According to Frank Zappa, a 34-minute collection of rare Zappa solos on an audio cassette that Guitar World released in 1987. “This is the first time I’ve had a reason to play my guitar in three years — and now I will try and tune my guitar,” he says. It was to be his last recorded guitar performance.
In fact, it was several years before that — in October 1986 — that I interviewed Zappa at his Laurel Canyon Fortress of Solitude, now occupied by Lady Gaga, to plan out the tracks of that very same Guitar World cassette — and talk about guitar stuff. [A vinyl edition of the album was re-released on Record Store Day, April 13, 2019.]
As we — GW associate publisher Greg Di Benedetto and I — descended with Frank into the bowels of his private inferno, otherwise known as the United Muffin Research Kitchen (U.M.R.K.), he told me with a straight face that he hadn’t played serious guitar in two years and that he’d even lost his calluses.
After viewing the documentary, I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and weighed his statement about giving up on the guitar back in ’84 against his liner note on the cassette about the song “A Solo from Atlanta,” recorded live in autumn 1984: “There weren’t very many people at this concert. Too bad they missed it. This was toward the end of the 1984 tour. The last concert of the tour was the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, December 23. I haven’t played the guitar at all
