I’d start playing and singing and then someone would walk by with a drum kit! I couldn’t concentrate.Įventually, all the activity had quieted down and there’s just me and Frank. It was a construction project that never ended! Every time I went up to Frank’s house it was like, “Oh, there’s another room, then, added on!” “Yeah, we moved the pool!” Anyway, at that time, they were moving gear around and Frank was sitting there at a studio console. I came in during the early part of the day, and it was in his basement, which eventually would become a fantastic studio over the years. You fell short in your first audition for him and asked for another chance. Being self-taught, I was the only bandmember not reading from sheet music. At weekends, I’d go home with him and he’d teach me what’s coming up next. That three months that we rehearsed, it was five days a week, 10 hours a day and I learned five hours’ worth of Zappa material. I loved Frank so much and he was really generous to me. He would say to me, “Adrian, would you wear a dress onstage?” And I’d say, “Sure! Why not? I’m in Frank Zappa’s band that’s what they’re known for!” I loved it and it was a great education. So when he was playing guitar, I would sing and when he was singing, I was playing guitar.Īnd that was my role, but also my role was to be a little theatrical. Not a lot of people know this about Frank, but he was not coordinated – in his opinion – to play guitar and sing at the same time it was either one or the other. He needed someone for the music he was writing that could do a lot of vocal styles. I was doing car horns in solos, but he never really said much to me about my guitar playing and later on he was quoted as saying that I reinvented the electric guitar. My guitar playing had started to be my own.
You came to Frank Zappa’s attention when you played with covers band Sweetheart. At one point he was joking around and he made his cello sound like seagulls with the bow and I thought: Oh my God! That’s fantastic! I wonder if I can do that with the guitar?
I saw a cellist on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and he was a comedian. Sound always fascinated me, like I could hear the rhythm of life when I was young. I always seemed to have a good ear for figuring out sounds. Where did your fascination for sound manipulation come from?Īs a child, I used to watch these cartoons – Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and all of those – and I’d try to mimic the sound of the different characters.
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