Posthumous album shows Frank Zappa in his final 'Phaze'

He worked feverishly to finish the dense, orchestral work his widow is releasing only through mail-order

By Rip Rense

San Francisco Examiner, 18 December 1994

FOR THE LAST 10 years of his life, Frank Zappa worked intermittently on "Civilization, Phaze III," a sprawling, 113-minute epic marked by the most complex and ambitious musical experimenting of his career.

Finishing the massive work assumed an increasing urgency after the musician/composer was diagnosed with cancer in 1990, and he made the last minor adjustments to it only weeks before his death at age 52 on Dec. 4, 1993.

"Civilization, Phaze III" will be released this week mail order only – on Zappa's own Barking Pumpkin Records.

"I think it's very much about finishing his life," says Gail Zappa, his widow. "After he finished this, he said, 'I've done everything that I can.' "

Described by Frank Zappa's own liner notes as "an opera-pantomime, with choreographed physical activity (manifested as dance or other forms of inexplicable sociophysical communication),""Civilization, Phaze III" will also be mounted onstage.

Just before his death, Zappa explained the theatrical concept for the work to choreographer Jamey Hampton (of the 150 Dance Troupe) and "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening who are planning a production. (The CD notes include Zappa's stage directions.)

"Frank was very specific about his ideas for it," says Groening. "He wanted to use old-fashioned stagecraft, nothing fancy, no TV monitors."

"Civilization, Phaze III" culminates a composing career that began when a teenage Zappa was inspired to write music after hearing the work of avant-gardist Edgard Varese. Although the likes of the London Symphony, Pierre Boulez and Kent Nagano have championed and recorded works, he is best known for biting pop-rock satires like "Valley Girl" (sung with daughter Moon Unit), "Dancing Fool" and "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk."

Composed largely at the Synclavier, a sophisticated computer-driven synthesizer capable of producing practically any imaginable sound, "Civilization, Phaze III' is basically orchestral in texture.

Conceptually and stylistically, the work is a continuation of Zappa's 1967 avant-garde ballet/narrative "Lumpy Gravy" and his 1968 album "We're Only in It for the Money," which has sometimes been called the "cynical flip side of (the Beatles') 'Sgt. Pepper.' "

"I think that 'Phaze III' is perhaps the ultimate destiny of this particular aspect (of his work)," says Gail Zappa.

Why release it mail-order only?

"I'm doing it this way as an experiment," says Gail Zappa. "I wanted to see who's really out there, and how much attention they're paying to the importance of Frank's music in their lives."

Though the album will be marketed in music stores "at some point," she wanted to make it available first "to those people who are loyal fans of Frank... without having to rely on an industry that never supported Frank in any way as a composer."

There are 19 pieces of music in "Phaze III" interspersed with a running dialogue left over from the 1967 "Lumpy Gravy" sessions, plus new dialogue recorded by Moon Unit Zappa and others.

For "Lumpy Gravy," Zappa prompted friends to "ramble incoherently” into microphones planted inside a piano, then edited their various speeches into an absurdist commentary that punctuated original orchestral music. "Phaze III" continues that tradition, as Zappa's own CD liner notes explain.

"What emerged from the (1967) texts was a vague plot regarding pigs and ponies, threatening the lives of characters who inhabit a large piano. In 'Civilization: Phaze III,' we get a few more clues about the lives of the piano dwellers and note that the external evils have only gotten worse since we first met them."

With or without the "piano dweller" story, the music of "Civilization: Phaze III" stands as the most dense and intricate Zappa ever created. At least one Of the titles, "Beat the Reaper," seems to grimly attest to the circumstances under which the composer worked to complete the music.

"Listening to it," says Groening, a longtime admirer who befriended Zappa late in life, "it feels like Frank was trying to cram as many musical ideas as possible, one after the other, into this piece. It's very thick and dense and overpowering as a listening experience. Even if you think you know Frank Zappa's music, I don't think anybody could be sufficiently prepared for the powerhouse that this thing represents."

Groening describes the sound as "Stravinsky-esque orchestral textures with Conlan Nancarrows tireless forward propulsion presented with the most cutting-edge technology."

"To give more of a sound bite,” he adds laughing, "this music should finally get Zappa taken truly seriously as a composer. There is nothing in contemporary music that sounds anything like it. I'll be listening to this piece for the rest of my life – that's for sure."

The centerpiece of the work is an 18-minute, six-movement composition titled "N-Lite." It is likely that no piece of music contains so much meticulously arranged, diverse sound. The composer described the work simply as "a frightening son-of-a-bitch."

The title? Zappa insisted it was merely a convenient computer label, as he said in a 1992 conversation with this writer.

"It was put together out of two unrelated sequences," he explained. "There's a group of notes in the front of this one sequence that just happens to sound like 'In the Navy' from that Village People song. You don't realize it until it's gone by, and then – that's 'In The Navy!' So that's the 'N,' and the 'Lite' part is this sequence that was basically a bunch of very fast and short synthesizer pockets that had the computer title, 'Thousand Points of Light.' So when you put the two together you get N-Lite, so it's not really a dramatic story. You have only eight letters to name these things in the computer program.

Groening remains unconvinced of the tide's frivolity.

"I think that was part of his artistic stance to not allow himself to be pinned down," he says.