Edited interview with Frank Zappa, originally published in Guitar Player, January 1977.

"Frank would write music for me to play that just had no business being performed on a guitar," Steve Vai told TG of his years as Zappa's 'stunt guitarist'. Jumping from classical-inspired sound collages to extended jazz-fusion improvisations, this was a band who lived without rules, helmed by a songwriter who played without limits. Though the mustachioed one died of prostate cancer in 1993, his son Dweezil's Zappa Plays Zappa tribute tours bring that questing spirit back from the grave.

Source: Vitaly Zaremba

In 2019 Guitarist quizzed Frank's son Dweezil on performing his father's legendary Hot Rats album live.
"I had to make a decision: how much of this record will I play note-for-note? Certain things were worth playing exactly the same. Like, obviously, the solo in Peaches En Regalia and Son Of Mr Green Genes, because that song is just so idiosyncratic. It's my dad, doing what he does, and you're not gonna top it. For others, like Willie The Pimp, I chose to learn a lot of the phrases but fill in the spaces between those guideposts with my own playing so I can also be free in my improvisation. But even when I'm playing freely, I'm still filtering what I play through his vocabulary. I know a lot of things that my dad would favour, the things that would be something he'd play. I didn't want to take a big left-turn and suddenly think, 'Oh, we're in a totally different space'.
"One thing you hear him do a lot is mix up different versions of triplets. He's got these really groovy pentatonic-bluesy runs where he's squeezing triplets in places that most people wouldn't think to do. And it's because he started as a drummer. It's almost like he's got little rudiment-type articulations. It's like sticking exercises or something – that have been attached to notes."