When it comes to Frank Zappa, most rock fans have two settings on their toggle: “off” or “thermonuclear.” I was in the “off “category through my teen years. His songs seemed dense, like he was chucking stone tablets from the stage. I flipped once I got to college. These days, it’s still work for me to fully appreciate his bent musical style. But it was his sense of humor that hooked me and keeps me still.
Who else, in the middle of a song, would walk across the SNL stage to a blackboard filled with lyrics, take out a long pointer, and direct the show’s off-camera announcer, Don Pardo, through a recitation of the song’s next verse?
Of course, it would be a blunder to underestimate the sweetly demented music itself. “Zappa was like the first musician that I had any interaction with that made it feel like it was okay to be weird in music,” says Baltimore-based sax player Vince Szynborski, whose name sounds like it could be a character in a Zappa song. Szynborski is a member of the band Furious Bongos, a group of Zappa devotees who will cap off a weeklong Mother’s Day Tour salute to their hero, who died in 1993, at the High Noon Saloon on May 19.
The band is not fooling around. The 10-member ensemble features top musicians from around the country, but a number of members are based in Madison, including guitarist/vocalist Lo Marie, bassist Conrad St. Clair, keyboardist Mike Massey, and percussionist Geoff Brady.
One member has a serious connection to Zappa himself: Multi-instrumentalist Arthur Barrow did four tours with the Zappa band in the 1970s. He served as the band’s rehearsal director, and can be heard playing multiple instruments on about a dozen Zappa albums.
Barrow also loves Zappa’s sense of humor. He once told Zappa that his new winter coat was “good down to 40 below.” Zappa responded, “Good for what? Preserving the corpse?” Then and now, Barrow is mostly centered on the non-conformist nature of Zappa’s compositions. Barrow says that once he got beyond the lyrical playfulness, “I began to realize that the music was interesting, too, and I heard chords that I was not familiar with as a teenager. Pretty soon I was sucked in.”
The Furious Bongos billed the current tour not as a note-for-note tribute but more of a musical adaptation — one that will allow the evolution of Zappa’s music to continue rather than stand still. Zappa transformed his music according to the players he worked with. So, too, have the Furious Bongos. The band rehearsed at a space just outside Washington, D.C., and has been touring with stops including Baltimore, Buffalo and Cleveland.
In preparation for the Zappa project band members tracked down hundreds of pages of notes and transcriptions scribbled down by former Zappa band members and even dug up rare scores in Zappa’s own hand — coffee stains and all.
The result will be a set of Zappa cuts that will include “Bobby Brown,” “Chunga’s Revenge,” “Zombie Woof” and “Willie the Pimp.”
What would Zappa say about their renditions? Former bandmate Barrow says, “I think he would be pleased. I think he would also point out all the mistakes and flaws. And I think he’d be really pleased that we have a really good mallet player and good vocals. Those two things were really important to him.”
