Zappa Plays Zappa - 2019 - Hot Rats Live - The Gumbo Variations.

Published: 23 May 2024
on channel: CrazyDigitalMusic

Dweezil Zappa - Hot Rats album live.

The Band :

Dweezil Zappa – lead guitar, vocals
Scheila Gonzalez – saxophone, flute, keyboards, harmonica, vocals
Ryan Brown – drums, percussion, vocals
Chris Norton – keyboards, violin, vocals
Kurt Morgan – bass, vocals
Cian Coey – vocals
Adam Minkoff - keyboards, guitar, snare drum, percussion, bass, vocals

A half-century after the album’s original release, Zappa embarked on the ultimate labour of love when his Zappa Plays Zappa project planned to tour Hot Rats.

There’s a good reason why you’ll never hear a covers band attempt Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats. It’s impossible. It’s unperformable. It’s unfathomable.

Even putting aside the art-rock icon’s leftfield electric guitar virtuosity, the 1969 album is a tapestry of overdubs and tape manipulation, a web of sonic subterfuge and obtuse one-offmanship, with makeshift ‘instruments’ that include a plastic comb and a mechanic’s wrench.

" One of the biggest challenges is the Hot Rats production. It’s a great-sounding album. People really appreciate it just on an audio level. So we wanted to make it evocative of the actual album and era. That’s almost as much work as learning the notes themselves.

The real challenge was to recreate the lead guitar tones, to explore what my dad would have been using to make that unique fuzz tone with the clean tone blended in there. He had a kind of Frankenstein Goldtop he was playing at the time that had a Bigsby and a Telecaster pickup jammed in, so he had different out-of-phase options.

For the Hot Rats tour, I’ll be playing a replica from the Gibson Custom Shop. Gibson made it about eight years ago, based on photographs of the guitar and all the specs I gave them. We made it as era-specific as we could, so it looks beat-up and it has the missing knobs. My dad’s Goldtop had P-90s, with that Tele pickup jammed in right next to the bridge.

So my goal was to actually put the spotlight on the things he should have been known for – his compositional skills, his arranging, his guitar playing… "

Watch video Zappa Plays Zappa - 2019 - Hot Rats Live - The Gumbo Variations. online, duration hours minute second in high quality that is uploaded to the channel CrazyDigitalMusic 23 May 2024. Share the link to the video on social media so that your subscribers and friends will also watch this video. This video clip has been viewed 40 times and liked it 4 visitors.

215