Frank Zappa's 'last word'

One of the front-burner issues has been the digital music rights for the work that makes up Frank Zappa's primary catalog. Many recording artists have expressed their distaste for digital sound, arguing that when their work is compressed into MP3 files, it can seem flat and thin. What the public might not know, Gail says, "is that it was Frank's concept to limit [the sale] to a format so that it was accurately represented, that being 16-bit technology -- CDs. He didn't want it compressed. So we're currently in a lawsuit over this issue."

What's at stake here is intent: "iTunes has been from the get-go massively compressed. That's fine perhaps if you're Britney Spears . . . but it's not fine for Frank Zappa's music, and he was interested in protecting that." A spokesperson for Rykodisc parent Warner Music had no comment.

Peering into genius

TO LABEL Frank Zappa an iconoclast would only be rounding the corner of the neighborhood where he and his imagination reside. There's so much stirring at every turn and busy intersection: glances of doo-wop, blues, faux-psychedelia. His music couldn't be fenced-in in terms of genre. In fact, much of it is an amalgam of styles -- embracing, say, heavy artillery guitar-rock with nods to composers Igor Stravinsky or Edgard Varese -- that reflected his citizen-of-the world sensibilities.

Angular and antic, prescient and political and vamped-up in tricky time signatures, Zappa was of his time -- as a commentator and a critic -- and light years ahead of it. "Frank often said," Gail says, "that his job was to go 'out there' and come back . . . and tell you what I found out.'"

Part of the idea behind opening the vaults was to chart those travels and to give audiences an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at the composer's process. As Vaultmeister, Travers isn't just cataloging the contents, but, he says "also investigating the possibilities." Since 1995, Travers, the drummer for a band led by Frank's son Dweezil, Zappa Plays Zappa, has been sifting through the assets; a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling audio/video and all-manner of miscellany magic library.

Though every silver film canister, tape box or VHS shell is marked in Frank Zappa's own hand, "it doesn't mean that you'll find what you think in there," says Travers, so there is a fair amount of mind-reading and extrapolating. There is basically every kind of format that music was archived on from the '50s to the '70s, and Travers has about 40% of it cataloged both on hard drive and CD.