Martin Perlich: Can you tell about what happened
with John and Yoko and the Fillmore?
ZAPPA: Yes, I can tell you very specifically
what happened with John and Yoko at the Fillmore.
I was scheduled to do an interview with
Howard Smith from a radio station in New York,
and at 1:00 in the afternoon
I was awakened out of bed in my hotel room,
came stumbling to the door in my pants
with my hair in my eyes
and all kinds of little sleep dust (chuckles),
and I'm going, oh, God, another interview.
And I open the door, and here's Howard,
standing at the door with a tape recorder
already flailing away and stuffs a microphone
in my face and says,
hi, Frank, I brought along two friends of mine,
this is John and Yoko,
and I was supposed to go eek
and stumble backwards in a blind stupor.
But I said, okay, you guys, come on in,
so they walked in and sat down and, you know,
started doing this interview,
and blah and blah and the interview,
and blah and blah and blah, and then finally,
when the interview is over, I said,
would you guys like to jam with us tonight
at the Fillmore?
And John said, well, he didn't think that he would,
but Yoko was positive that she would.
And so I said, well, okay, Yoko, you know, come on down,
and come down a little early and, you know,
come in the dressing room and we'll figure out
something that we can do that will musically relate
after the concert.
So, we sat around in this little room upstairs
and played some old rhythm-and-blues stuff for a while,
and then they went out and sat in the sound mixer's booth
throughout the show, and I guess they liked it a lot,
because when the thing was over, they both ran down,
they were ready to go on as soon as we went off.
So we played for about 40 minutes, I guess,
and it just so happened that we had made arrangements
to record that night.
That's the same night we did the Fillmore album.
And the whole thing got laid down on tape,
and John and I had an agreement that
we were going to jointly mix the tape and decide
how we were going to put it out, you know,
because there are big contract difficulties
involved in getting the thing out.
So it sat around for a while, I guess about a year,
and there was nothing done about releasing it.
Finally, I got word that John was going to release it
and that some negotiation was going to be worked out,
but that negotiation never occurred.
As a matter of fact, he went in,
I had sent him a safety copy of the 16-track masters,
and I guess he went in with Phil Specter and mixed
the thing with this ridiculous tape-delay echo on it.
He turned off Mark and Howard's voices
on the section called Scumbag,
and they were the only ones
who were really singing on it,
and you can't even hear them
on their version of the thing.
I have a mix of the thing, too.
You wouldn't even recognize the two events.
And, you know, they did weird things,
like put in certain applause where it didn't really
occur and, you know,
they changed the thing around.
And then, the ultimate insult was to take the tune
King Kong, which was obviously an ensemble performance,
you know, where everybody in The Mothers
knew what they were playing.
They were playing the melody.
It was obviously a song, you know.
If it had been a situation where I was mixing the thing,
I would say, well, that's obviously a song,
what is the name of that song and who
has the writing and publishing on that?
Well, it didn't occur in their case.
They retitled King Kong, Jam Rag,
took the publishing and writing credit
and put that on the album that way, you know,
so consequently there was a number of very irate
phone calls between our office and Allen Klein and,
you know, a bunch of show business crap, like that.
Anyway, that's the story of the Fillmore album.
Martin: Frank Zappa and the Electric Tongue--
Captioning by The Closed Captioning Project LLC
Transcription by AccurateSecretarial.com
