Rebel Without Applause
Interview by Michael Snyder, story by Blair Jackson
L.A.'s Original Freak is One Mean Mother
Frank, do you fear reprisals for having always been blatantly sexual and scatological?
No.
You don't expect to be attacked by some crazed morality play?
No.
What about Anita Bryant?
I wouldn't worry until she gets a job with the California Citrus growers. You can understand the Florida Citrus Growers as Bebe Rebozo types.
Orlando and Disney World. Don't you love to confront that back home in Southern California? Orange County? Right-wing madness?
There's right-wing madness everywhere. There's tons of it down in the lobby. What are you gonna do? Cower in the corner? Those people should go fuck themselves.
Talk about strange. Here is Frank Zappa – weirdo jazz/rocker-social-satirist-serioso-put-on-composer-producer-absurdo-freak-out King number one – sitting with his wife Gail in the oh-so-posh and oh-so fabulously exclusive Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The Fairmont – home of the gold-plated, $5 bacon and eggs breakfast. Zappa in a black T-shirt, pants rolled high to reveal candy-cane striped socks and snake-skin shoes (or at least pseudo-snakeskin shoes) that look like they were ripped-off from some slick pimp down on West Macarthur in Oakland – in a second floor suite at the Fairmont. There's nothing Absolutely Free about that, eh?
How come you're staying at the Fairmont, anyway? Isn't it a bit austere? Why not the Miyako, like the rest of the rock stars?
I don't like the Miyako. I stayed there before. It's got a very cold atmosphere and I don't like the food. The room service is slow and the bed isn't comfortable. The room service here is okay. The food's all right.
The beds?
The beds? [He shrugs and makes a noncommittal noise.] The couch isn't bad.
The couches are good.
What charming cups and saucers! I can see what you mean about gracious living. This is gracious living.
Is this gracious living or what? Karl Malden could've stayed here at one time. [He points to a strawberry tart.] Karl could've had one of those.
On second thought, he does have one of those ... on the end off his nose.
Obviously the Fairmont's graciousness isn't contagious.
Frank Zappa interview number 3,716. He's been talking non-stop since 1965 and still ... after all these years and millions of profound, idiotic, insightful, and just plain weird things that have been printed about the guy, there's still a line of interviewers waiting to talk to crazy Frank about the Mothers and music and CIA plots and Ugly Radio and mutants and the whole bizarre dada-istic schmeer.
Here's Zappa, the man who wrote the book on how not to be a commercial success in the venal world of pop music, staying at the Fairmont, awaiting a sold-out gig at Stanford University's huge Maples Pavilion.
Someone down at Stanford has a sense of humor. The Zappa show is to take place the night of the Big Game, the annual gridiron clash between Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. And that's a rah-rah affair all the way. The aging alumni fly in from every state in the Union, and every student worthy of the 3.8 average and million dollar bank account it takes to get into the school is going to go to that game, get plenty bombed, and go to the post-game concert starring ... Frank Zappa? Not exactly middle-of-the-road fare to delight the visiting class of '47, or the beautiful but frosty Atherton girls who like to sip margaritas and maybe smoke a joint or two to the strains of Fleetwood Mac and James Taylor.
But then, Stanford has always been a bit on the peculiar side. After all, this is the university whose marching band did a tribute to "the pill" on national television a few years back. Everything about the Stanford band is slightly Zappa-esque – they're chaotic, funny, sometimes unfathomable, but when you get past the crazy exterior of gorilla suits, Tarzan outfits, funny hats, and the row of painted tubas that spell "FUCK CAL" in formation, you've got a bunch of good musicians playing as progressive a marching sound as you're likely to find at an American college.
So how come you're playing Palo Alto and passing on San Francisco?
Because of Bill Graham. He didn't want to pay the right amount of money. He has a monopoly on this town. I have nothing against him personally. I like Graham. He's quite a character, but business is business. When somebody doesn't want to pay me what it costs me to bring a show to town because he's got a monopoly on a certain area, I resent it and instruct my manager to deal with that person. To sit still on the road with 85,000 pounds of equipment and 20 or so people costs a fortune. Someone thinks this is a major metropolitan area that must be serviced. Big Deal.
Isn't that a prevalent attitude in other urban centers?
In a lot of locations, one guy will control all the dates in a town's largest public hall and wants to grab you by the weenie every time you go in there.
Das Hip Kapital?
There's nothing hip about the business those people are in. It's selling shoes. It's selling seats. One day it's us. The next day it's the Lippizan Stallions.
How about getting over in the business end of the music biz? I understand you're encountering hassles from associates who have turned a corner on you. Is it because of waning popularity?
It's got nothing to do with popularity. Look, I just finished a tour. I've been on the road for three months. I don't have a record out. I haven't had a record out for over a year, and our touring business is better than ever before, and nobody can figure it out.
I don't need good reviews in newspapers and magazines. I don't even have to be fashionable. I don't have to stick a safety pin through my ear, my cheek, or any other part of my body. If we go on stage and play, there are enough people who know that what we bring to their town is something that they don't want to miss.
Where is your most vociferous audience?
New York. I like the Palladium. We did six shows there in four days over Halloween. Broke their old attendance record. Had a wonderful time. Filmed four of the shows.
What about California audiences?
They're too laid-back. "Laid-back" is a crock of shit.
Zappa has never needed to be fashionable, and you'd have to go way, way back to find a time when Francis Vincent Zappa, Jr., was playing music that could even remotely be considered "mainstream."
Born in Baltimore, sewer of the Eastern Seaboard, in December of 1940, Zappa moved to California with his family when he was ten years old. He lived in Sacramento for a while, but by his late high school years, the Zappa family had relocated in the desert community of Lancaster. He graduated from Antelope Valley High in big '58 and if signs that Frank was ... well ... different were cropping up back then, perhaps we can blame it on nuclear testing in the Mojave.
Like quite a few teens of that era, Zappa was enamored of R&B and the doo-wop music that served as a soundtrack for many young people's lives. But Zappa was also fascinated by such diverse composers as Edgar Varese, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Stockhausen, and John Cage – all masters of 20th Century "classical" music.
His first instrument was the drums; but he picked up the guitar easily, and that, of course, has remained his passion.
You're a hot guitarist, Frank. [confiding] You're a killer.
Yeah, I'm a killer.
Who were you're major influences as a guitarist?
Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Gatemouth Brown, and Guitar Slim.
Some of my friends tell me that they'd rather see you perform than John McLaughlin.
Well, they've got excellent taste.
Zappa played in cocktail lounges for a while once he was out of high school, and he even stooped so low as to write scores for "B" movies, trashy films like The World's Greatest Sinner.
But all during this period when he was developing his chops and, to some extent, selling out, he was finding time to work on his own musical ideas. He and Don van Vliet (later to become known as "Captain Beefheart") would get together and record odd pieces at a small, three-track studio in Cucamonga, and Zappa seemed to always have his hand in some group: [The] Blackout[s], his first band in Lancaster; the Omens, which included Beefheart; Captain Glasspack & His Magic Mufflers; and on down the road until he formed the Mothers (later dubbed the Mothers of Invention, in part because MGM Records didn't like the nasty connotation the word "mother" sometimes takes on.)
From the outset the Mothers became a vehicle for Zappa's complex and peculiar visions. Here was a guy playing '50's stuff and ballsy R&B and even his own humorous and undeniably warped compositions in the hey-day of Beatlemania. By '65, the Byrds had a hit and every band in L.A. was expected to play that kind of well scrubbed folk-rock. Zappa would have none of it.
He took a different path, growing his hair long and making the other Mothers do likewise. (A couple of them used to wear their hair slicked into pompadours when they weren't playing because Orange County was no place to be with long hair back then ... or now for that matter.)
The Mothers wore outlandish clothes, played dissonant Mad Hatter music; but amazingly, they got gigs.
Herb Cohen, who had been influential in the L.A. folk-rock scene early on, took The Mothers under his managerial wing and managed to land this group of self proclaimed uglies and miscreants dates at such long-gone night spots as The Trip, The Action and The Big Time, as well as the venerable Whisky a Go Go.
The Mothers became kingpins of Hollywood's outcast artist/freak fringe scene – a sub-society that in many ways resembled the fashionably unfashionable world that revolved around pop artist Andy Warhol and his Factory during the same era. It was an artistic scene, to be sure, but it also had as much to do with radical anti-politics and not-very-clean fun. In fact, Zappa and the Mothers were even included in a forgettable film called Mondo Hollywood in late '65. (The group was not in the final version, however, because manager Cohen demanded that the group be paid for their part in the film.)
That scene mushroomed during the early months of 1966, just as the very different Haight-Ashbury trip was growing 400 miles up the coast. On July 29 of that year, the Mothers were involved in a sort of acid-test south called GUAMBO (Great Underground Arts Masked Ball and Orgy), a benefit to raise money for the original underground paper, the L.A. Free Press. Zappa appeared onstage wearing a suit of flowers, while some of the band members wore tuxedos. There were light shows, the crush of 2000 spaced-out revelers, and the usual police problems. Later that year they played a series of still legendary concerts at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown L.A.
Though famous – perhaps "notorious" is a better word – in Southern California by mid-'66, the Mothers didn't explode on the rest of the nation until later that year, when Verve, a subsidiary of MGM Records, released the double-disc Freak Out, one of those rare albums that truly lives up to its name.
From its quasi-psychedelic cover to its songs about the Watts riots ("Trouble Coming Every Day") and L.A. freak-dom ("Help, I'm a Rock"), that record stands as a valuable – if difficult to decipher – document of that era. It is unmatched in its cynicism, sarcasm, and acerbic wit, not to mention mind-bogglingly complex and progressive music. The jumpy, stop-start rhythms, insane lyrics, and vocal performances about as far removed from the prevailing Beatles/Byrds harmonies as you could get, caught most listeners off-guard, horrifying some, boring others, but definitely intriguing a few. It as an underground album, made with apparently no interest in commerciality and with a distinctively freak/artiste view of the L.A. scene.
Zappa once told an interviewer that Freak Out was made after "I made research tapes of behavior of 17-year-old kids in Ontario, California," and it sounds like it. It's a scathing commentary on the Southern California freeway-shopping center world, the society that encourages concrete and neon to flourish, and on the victims of L.A.'s crass mega-growth – the young. It was biting, but always done with humor. After all, how could anyone take seriously a man who looked like a greaser version of one of the gents on the Dutch Masters cigar box, who frequently wore a full-length fur coat (that, according to that immortal Mothers character Suzy Creamcheese, made him look "like a dead cat"), and who recorded music that was not only off-the-wall, but off-the-planet, as well?
Is there any conflict between comedy and gaining recognition as a creative musician?
In my mind there is no difference between making somebody laugh and making somebody think. One's not better or worse than the other. I like all different kinds of music and I think that they're all fun to do and I'll do whatever I feel like doin'. And all the rest of these people who think that they're doing "serious" rock can kiss my ass.
Does the pretension of certain artsy or classically-influenced rock bands annoy you?
Is "serious" something that doesn't make you laugh? The boldest step that anybody can take in aesthetics is to say "Okay, I don't care whether they like it. I will suit myself." One of my theories of life is that nobody will ever agree with you unless they already agree with you.
Many of your contemporaries, those folks into "serious" rock, gloss over your work as comedy or just ignore you.
It's got to be threatening to them.
Do you think you're arrogant?
No, I'm realistic. I may be one of the few people that you'll ever meet who'll tell you the truth. I can't help it if I'm good at what I do, and I'm not going to lie about it. I'm fan-fucking-tastic.
Do you feel any kinship with the Marx Brothers in your humor & cynicism?
More with the Three Stooges.
A pie in the face?
A hammer on the head. The ladder with the whitewash sitting on it when you turn around.
By the same token, there are things you do with humor that are more sophisticated than slapstick.
There is nothing more sophisticated than slapstick. It's all how you perceive it. To the person with rudimentary perceptions, it may be funny because of the simple action of the whitewash getting on the guy's clothes. For me, it's a whole different story.
Metaphysics?
Sure.
Do you think tragedy is an inherent part of comedy?
No. I think people laugh for non-verbal reasons.
Trying to articulate those reasons is …
A waste of time. I don't think that communication is based in language, anyway. [Sneering.] Especially not in printed language. Spoken language is nothing more elaborate than decorated grunts. When you consider how faulty the decoding mechanism is as it tries to make sense out of language, then you can see where problems will arise.
Mothers concerts during the late '60's also revolved around the combination of "serious" music and humor, as well as Zappa's fabled "atrocities," a catch-all phrase for staged chaos. Zappa performed marriages onstage; he pulled people from the audience and forced them to make speeches; and strange objects, like a monstrous stuffed giraffe rigged so that it would ejaculate whipped cream into the audience, littered the stage. ("We used to get requests for the giraffe," Zappa once said.) it was mad and unstructured: a constant circus of strangeness, all tearing up the Southland while San Franciscans played "Flower Power."
What's there to live for?
Who needs the Peace Corps?
Think I'll just drop out.
I'll go to Frisco, buy a wig and sleep on Owsley's floor
I'll stay a week and get the crabs and take a bus back home
I'm really just a phony, but forgive me 'cause I'm stoned
Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet
Psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street.
Go to San Francisco!
– From "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" 1967.
In a 1967 interview with Jazz and Pop's Frank Kofsky, Zappa came down hard on the San Francisco scene, remarking that "it's like a club ... You go to the Avalon Ballroom and they pass out feathers and bells. But that's it, man. That's phony. That's like if we were to hand out molotov cocktails in the lobby; it'd be just as phony."
And he's still harping on it.
We're Only In It For the Money derides San Francisco, Flower Power and the so-called Hippie movement on a number of cuts. I heard a KSAN radio interview you did on your last tour that was absolutely scathing on the subject. No mercy. Do you think that attitude is a tired issue or still worth kicking around?
What ever you like. You want to talk about tired issues, I'll talk about 'em. I'm here to entertain you.
Your here to entertain everybody. If you've got it, entertain it.
Okay, here it is. I believe that San Francisco and its citizens were used by the United States government for LSD experiments, psychological warfare experiments, and germ warfare experiments during that period of time. I think that the whole Haight-Ashbury phenomenon was manufactured, and I think that the people who were victimized by those drugs during that time ought to sue the government. You're looking at a place that was chosen as the home of the manufactured zombies.
All this stuff about the CIA drug-houses has been coming to light. It might make sense.
It does. After the CIA discovers this potential weapon, where are they going to try it out on large number of people? In an urban setting. Take a map. Stick a pin. San Francisco gets the vote. You know those, funny little camps they were opening up during the '60's?
The camps for dissidents?
The ones where they put the Japanese people during World War II. They were sprucing them up in the 1960's
Detention camps.
Yeah. Why were they opening them up?
The government feared that campus unrest would lead to widespread rioting?
I don't think they feared the students or needed a place to lock them away. I think the camps were a safety valve, in case the chemical experiments failed and you had tens of thousands of uncontrolled potential murderers on the street. If they dosed 'em too much and everything got out of hand, the only answer would have been to round them up and stick them in those camps.
Not only did We're Only In It... make a mockery of S.F., it also parodied the sacrosanct album of its day, the Beatles Sgt. Pepper. The remarkably Pepper-like jacket showed The Mothers in drag amidst chaos where the satin-suited Beatles should have been. "We're only in it for the money" was a typically comic/absurdist thought – the pride of the underground taking a shot at the kings, the Untouchables upstaging the Brahmans for one shining moment.
Because so many of Zappa's songs were totally wigged-out, seemingly illogical, and because The Mothers on & off-stage behavior was – how can we put this? – "eccentric," most people assumed that Zappa and company were heavy drug users. You know what they used to say: "When in doubt, blame it on LSD." Well, believe or not, Zappa has never been a drug user, and at the height of San Francisco's acid days, he was publicly decrying the use of either marijuana (he says he's smoked it twice, though some – even close associates – secretly believe that Zappa has been a closet-junkie from the beginning) or hallucinogens. He hasn't changed his story since.
I believe people use drugs as a license to act stupid; the same way other generations use alcohol. One bunch of people says, "I was drunk. Forgive me. "Another says I'm sorry I made a fool out of myself, I was so stoned."
Many of the new bands profess to be vehemently anti-drug.
Yeah? What about beer?
Your negative comments about drugs lead me to assume that the attitude carries over to the way you run your band.
What people do on their own time is their business. Once you start a tour, you're working in a professional situation from the time you leave the airport and your home base to the time you get back at the end of the last date. Everybody that's in that touring unit relies on everybody else, from the roadies right on through.
Consequently, drugs are out the window.
That's right.
No poonin' around?
What? You mean chasing girls? That's always permissible.
Yeah?
And advisable. Aside from drugs being a license to act stupid, they often represent a substitute for sex when people can't get laid.
You get a bigger rush from an orgasm than from a snort of crystal methedrine.
Never having tried crystal methedrine, I don't know what you're talking about, but I will say that fucking is theoretically superior to anything chemical that you can stick in your body.
There are those who grew weary of Zappa's constant self-conscious soap-boxing on unpopular issues and of his seemingly relentless stabs at "social satire" as early as the second album, Absolutely Free, and who have instead followed the development of his music. Those people have had a challenging, mind-bending trip keeping up with Zappa's continually-shifting musical moods and ideas.
Absolutely Free, released in 1967, contained what is certainly among the first extended rock jams on record, the fabulously exciting "Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin." It's a completely manic piece of music showcasing Zappa's jagged guitar playing, which effectively proved that the Mothers – those crazy anarchists – could rock with the best of them. Of course this "serious" rocker was surrounded by the usual Mothers inanity – a fake torch song called "Amnesia Vivace" and a reprise of the classic "Call Any Vegetable" – but that album made believers out of a lot of skeptics, and sold a highly respectable quarter-million copies.
Other significant albums released over the next couple of years included the orchestral, but strikingly modern, Lumpy Gravy (which is Zappa's personal favorite of the discs he's made) and the Mothers' doo-wop LP, Cruising with Ruben and the Jets. The latter album remains perhaps the most accessible record Zappa has ever made, and it stands as a perfect satire of '50's music and song themes. Sha Na Na never would have had the nerve to show their faces in public if more people had heard Ruben.
Zappa's next milestone LP was 1969's Hot Rats, cited by many as the finest of the early jazz-rock fusion attempts. Although the monotonous "Willie the Pimp," which featured Captain Beefheart's pitiful croaking above a fairly mundane rock arrangement, is remembered best (it was a titanic meeting of the loons, after all), it was "Gumbo Variations" and "Peaches en Regalia" that were most significant, both for their integration of rock and jazz ideas, and their heavy use of synthesizers, still rarely employed at that time. It also demonstrated beyond a doubt what Mothers aficionados had known for years – that Zappa is an extraordinary band leader.
Some of the country's best-known fusion players did stints in Zappa's band at one time or another. Reeds player Ian Underwood, drummer Aynsley Dunbar, keyboardist George Duke, and violinists Sugarcane Harris and Jean-Luc Ponty are just a few who learned a great deal from their tenures with Zappa. As a composer, arranger, and band leader, he has always managed to bring out the best in the musicians he worked with. And that may be because of his strong interest in continually playing with different musicians.
Tell me about your proposed musical motorpool.
That idea was adopted by Mick Jagger when he tried to assemble his "Rock'n'Roll Circus." It turned into the "Heavy Friends" concept.
An outgrowth of jazz improvisation?
No. You don't have a jam session, because that's always nonproductive. That's ego-schmego. Turn it up louder than the next guy. One boring solo after another.
I was talking about people from different kinds of music getting together for specialized, purposely short-lived groups. They'd have a specific repertoire, learning songs and rehearsing for only one tour.
Waka/Jawaka, a sort of Hot Rats, Part II released in 1972, included the famous side-long "Big Swifty," which let Aynsley Dunbar and George Duke show their chops in a display that neither has equaled since. It also revealed little-known Sal Marquez, whose muted trumpet solo recalled some of Miles Davis' best moments, to be a real giant in this band of all-stars.
Duke's fine work with Zappa continued a while longer – 1974's Apostrophe featured more innovative keyboard work. Also noteworthy on the LP was Jack Bruce's stunning bass line on the title track, perhaps his strongest work since Cream disbanded.
Since Apostrophe, Zappa has recorded some more with Captain Beefheart (they even got together for a celebrated tour a couple of years back) and made a few other records as well. Of special note is 1976's Zoot Allures, his last record.
That's not Zappa's whole story as a recording artist, by any means. In the 12 years since Freak Out freaked out America, Zappa has made more than 20 albums, with and without the Mothers. Zappa aficionados are proud of such gems as Uncle Meat, a bizarre soundtrack to a movie that never quite made it to your neighborhood theater (though the baffling, surrealistic 200 Motels may have played in your town); Weasels Ripped My Flesh, best known for its cartoon cover that gruesomely portrayed a man "shaving" with a very sharp-clawed weasel; Live at the Fillmore East, largely comprised of humorous bits of Fugs-ish filth and nastiness; and the Roxy and Elsewhere live LP which, besides including a tune called "Penguins in Bondage," also featured a pair of killer instrumentals, "Echidna's Arf" and "Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?" on which trombonist Bruce Fowler and keyboardists Duke and Don Preston, a long-time Zappa associate, really got the opportunity to shine.
Amazingly, Zappa is currently without a recording contract, having had a parting of the ways with his former distributors – Warner Bros. Records. He is entangled in two huge lawsuits, one against Warners for breach of contract, the other with former manager Herb Cohen and his brother Martin. So Zappa's grand new project, a four album set called Lather (pronounced "leather;" Zappa says it contains everything from punk rock to orchestral music) is currently on the back burner, awaiting both a resolution of his legal problems with Warners, and for a new company to pick up distribution of his Zappa Records label.
In the meantime, Zappa and his current band – Adrian Belew (rhythm guitar); Peter Wolf and Tommy Mars (keyboards); Ed Mann (percussion); Patrick O'Hearn (bass); and Terry Bozzio (drums) – have been touring successfully all over the country, giving bold audiences typically wild and stimulating shows, and, in Zappa's case, giving delighted interviewers a chance to pick at Zappa's brain about old friends.
What became of the GTO's? [The GTOs were an outrageous band of groupies and dancers that recorded for Zappa's Straight Records years ago.]
One's dead. Most of the rest of them are married.
Where's Beefheart?
He's on tour.
What's holding up his new LP?
The Cohen brothers.
Where's Wild Man Fischer? [Fischer was another crazy Zappa took under his wing.]
Somewhere in Los Angeles.
You know, that record, An Evening with Wild Man Fischer, still sells regularly around these parts.
Really? Funny. I haven't seen any profits from it. Guess I'll have to talk to the Cohen brothers.
What's your old bass player, Roy Estrada, up to?
He's driving a truck for the Department of Highways in Colorado.
How about Flo and Eddie? [More former Mothers, not to mention former Turtles.]
They're managed by Herb Cohen. You may never hear of them again.
...and about his hobbies and stuff...
What do you do for a good time?
I watch Cable TV at home.
I watched some on the hotel TV last night. The local news was pretty amazing. It was the local station. At the beginning of the show they announced, "Send the kiddies out for a glass of milk. The first part of our news is going to be a little sleazy." They talked with some guy who was accused of obtaining 12 year old boys for some weird prostitution ring in town. Then they showed videotapes of slain prostitutes in New York. One had been electrocuted. Another had been strangled. One had acid thrown on her face. They were showing pictures of these dead bodies on the screen.
Then they had a story about the people in one area chasing prostitutes off the street. Then there was an editorial about how the community was going to pot because of all these prostitutes and queers. Finally, they had the semi-scandal about the SF Chief of Police having his picture taken with Margo St. James and a girl called Wonder Whore. That's all the news there was here. It's as if the world had stopped and the only thing that was going on was that people in this city were checking their pee-pee.
It's happening everywhere. People don't have anything else to check.
Well, it's that first step to Nazism. You scare the people in the community who don't understand their body functions. They get to the point where they'll accept any form of political regime that will take away this mythological horror that's going to come and get them.
… what would a Frank Zappa interview be without THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE and FRANK'S PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY i.e., THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH?
What's the most shocking secret being kept from the masses today?
Everybody has the potential to be intelligent.
What needs to be done to achieve that end?
Well, I used to say, "There are two things wrong with this world: one of them is readers, and the other one is writers." But I've modified that. There are three things wrong with this world. One of them is readers. The other one is writers. And the biggest problem is mental health. People are not mentally healthy.
What does that spring from?
A bad diet. Not just the things they eat, but the rest of their sociological and psychological diet. The things that are fed to them.
How do you change the whole human race.
You don't. It'll do what it's gonna do.
You can't change anybody's thought patterns?
No, because everybody believes they're right. The only time they're going to agree with you is if you happen to have some tenet of your philosophy that is in sync with their philosophy. It may be for all the wrong reasons, but if you have a similarity of thought with somebody else, then it's "oh yeah. I agree with him."
You consider yourself to be an intellectual, feeling human being and there are billions of others out there with the same belief. Now, I may think that's a crock of shit, but what's the difference? Anybody who doesn't believe that what they're doing is right needs psychiatric help. They're going to be constantly hiding in fear of what they do.
I don't expect to have everybody like what I do. I don't expect them to understand it and I don't give a fuck. If I set a challenge for myself, the thing that matters is meeting that challenge by the time the event is completed. And I grade myself harder than anybody else is going to grade me. I know what I want to do when I start doing it. I know what I'm doing while I'm doing it. I know what it's supposed to be when it's done. I'm watching all the time.
And what does it all mean? It means that someone who titled one of his albums Burnt Weenie Sandwich and who named his three children – humanoids who will someday walk the streets of Los Angeles – Ahmet, Dweezil and Moon Unit, is really a pretty rational guy. After all, when's the last time you stayed at the Fairmont?
Read by OCR software. If you spot errors, let me know afka (at) afka.net