Dweezil Zappa won't desist playing whatever he wants
Things have gotten so bad between guitarist Dweezil Zappa and his family that when their California homestead recently was sold to Lady Gaga, Dweezil heard about it online.
For a decade, Dweezil has been a mainstay in Zappa Plays Zappa, a touring tribute band paying homage to his father, Frank, who died in 1993. Dweezil and his mother, Gail, had long squabbled over, among other things, rights to the name “Zappa Plays Zappa.” Things worsened after Gail's death in 2015. She left controlling interest in the Zappa Family Trust to his younger siblings, Ahmet and Diva, relegating Dweezil and his sister Moon to lesser roles.
Dweezil and Ahmet, who used to be close, took the family feud public this year. Ahmet says his brother need only pay a token fee of a dollar per year to use the “Zappa Plays Zappa” name; Dweezil says the trust wants more than a dollar as well as all the tour merchandise profits.
To Dweezil, the band, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Frank's debut, “Freak Out!” is “a continuation of a relationship between me and my dad,” which makes everything even more painful and raw. Currently on a tour that, for legal reasons, he's calling “Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F@%K He Wants: The Cease and Desist Tour,” Dweezil talked about the growing schism in the Zappa family.
The following is an edited transcript of that conversation:
A: It's just really mind-bogglingly stupid how it all went down. It doesn't make any sense. You can speculate it's all about greed and power.
A: I started touring in 2006, and there was an agreement made for merchandise between my mom and myself. She was running ZFT. She disregarded the agreement and never paid my part of the merchandise for 10 years. When she passed away, Ahmet and Diva were running it, and I was hoping they would see the error of Gail's ways and rectify the situation, but they chose to make it worse. They basically said, Gail didn't honor the deal, and we're not going to, either, and we're going to continue to take 100 percent of the merch, and if you don't allow us to do that, then you can't play the music at all. So I changed the name of the tour … then they went after me for the name change.
A: There's not a lot of good possibilities, with the way that they're handling stuff, and they're being advised by the same legal team that my mom was advised by and ran her to be more than $6 million in debt at her demise. There's not a lot of good things going on over there.
A: Somebody under 30, if the name Frank Zappa came up, they would just say, “Who?” To me, that didn't sit well. My dad's accomplishments in music should be better known, not just in a popular way but better understood. If you only ever heard “Valley Girl,” or “Don't Eat The Yellow Snow,” you would get some impression that that was novelty music, but that's the only stuff that ever got on the radio.
A: I think he would be completely disturbed by how things went.
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