| Reverse translation from Italian
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| After a few years of absence from the road, Frank Zappa is back. One of the few remaining myths of the 60s. Beloved or hated, it doesn’t matter. So much has been written about him that he no longer wants to talk about music. Today he is a clear headed 48 years old gentleman who has retained all his particular and strong sense of humor, who knows he’s a musical genius and constantly continues his work, and who loves Tuttifrutti that has never asked him questions about music. We met him and he flooded us with everything that most amuses him at this time. Remember that Zappa, even when he thunders against something or someone, always ends up laughing maniacally. The following is not a real interview. He didn’t give us the chance for it. He wanted to talk freewheeling with us, at 2 am in a beautiful and quiet hotel room, barefoot with his feet on the couch, a lousy coffee and many cigarettes, short hair, the famous mustache a little bit grayed and two magnetic eyes that, when light up, are like glue. In one corner of the room there was a desk with a pen, an unfinished score and a pair of glasses. The genius produces incessantly.
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| So, Frank, where do we start?
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| Let’s start with drugs. By now they became a gigantic problem. Above all, drug dealing. We should teach adults, but especially children, not to take drugs. The most serious problem, however, is the drug dealing. Consider that there are children who earn $75 a day just to keep a lookout for drug dealers. The Los Angeles police arrested some kids who had $10,000 in their pocket! No other job gives you so much money, this is the point, and therefore more and more children are involved in this dealing, until they can no longer come out of it. Now there’s the crack that is spreading impressively. And by selling crack, these young people earn a lot of money. Few people use drugs just to give a try or to recreate occasionally. This happened in the 60s.
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| Today, instead, drug has become a status symbol, especially for middle-class people. But you should explain to these people that by sniffing cocaine you don’t become Superman. The problem isn’t the drug by itself but the impressive number of people involved in this dealing. If you, as an adult man, want to sniff cocaine from time to time, it’s your business. But when, to find this drug, you involve children to buy it or to keep a lookout to the dealers, then you must be prosecuted and punished. I believe that the duty of every government is to do something positive for its country. It should primarily worry about the dealers. The gangsters who do this trade have a real power, they have their own armies, armored cars, armed body guards, as well as a lot of money. So I think the government should sell drugs at a low price but imposing taxes like liquor or tobacco.
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| Yes, but how could you explain this to the people?
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| Through a reasoning of economic nature. The situation in America has become uncontrollable and the government doesn’t make any profit from it. By making drugs free, you’d kill two birds with one stone. Let me explain: first of all, the trade of drug dealers would be defeated and there would also be revenues for the government that could thus start a serious campaign against drugs. If we continue to worry only about the reason why people take drugs, we’ll continue to make the drugs sellers richer and we’ll never solve the problem.
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| Was it easy to prevent your children from taking drugs?
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| Yes, it was enough to give them an explanation. Consider that they don’t even smoke cigarettes and I don’t understand how they do, since I smoke a lot.
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| Related to the problem of drugs there’s also the problem of doctors…
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| Everyone who heals you is involved in the same trade, they are prescribing the substances to be administered to drug addicts to make them heal and inevitably they earn a lot of money. The more you are sick, the more they earn.
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| Religion is another reason for a bad state of mental health…
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| Religion tells you to think about the origin of man: where I come from, how I came into this world; while the real people’s problems and thoughts are different: how do I manage to fuck, etc.… They want people to wonder why they’re here… what do they want… Religion leads you to believe that you need these things and then tells you that it is able to give you an answer and, by the way, they make you pay for it.
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| Why do you say that they make you pay for it?
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| Just enter in any Christian church and you’ll see that at some point of the mass they pass with a basket, or something like that, in which you have to put your offer.
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| But this is not mandatory…
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| There’s no law saying you have to do it, but if you don’t do it, they’ll scowl at you. In this way they force you to contribute.
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| Whatever you do in this world has a price. Don’t you think it’s fair to pay or, more precisely, to contribute to the organization that they offer?
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| They teach you to believe that you need to know where you came from and how you should behave. They make you believe that they are the only ones able to give an answer to all your questions and, in doing so, they can also make money. Christians, who are certainly good people, listen to prayers and pray in front of sacred images: I believe that this becomes a form of superstition. The priests tell you the story of the creation by saying that God created the earth and then Adam and Eve, the original sin, the apple, Cain and Abel, and, in order to listen to them, people pay.
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| But this could be a simple story that people can easily understand and that serves to explain a more important concept.
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| I don’t believe in this story and, anyway, if they are God’s representatives, I don’t think they should be paid for this. They sell this story. There are many people who need to talk to priests, ayatollahs or rabbis and when they do, they pay because they make everybody believe they have special powers, special relationship with God. They get paid with money or by asking people to do something. This is what happened in the past with the Christians who went to die for their religion. If this simple story can make someone happy, if it can make people feel better, then I can accept it, but what I recommend to people is to stop being conditioned by the clergy, which I think is doing very little for them. If they took money from one person to give it to another needy one, that’s fine, but I don’t think this is happening. There are people in America who believe that the devil is a being with horns and tails. Isn’t this superstition? What doesn’t seem right to me is that religion is the belief of some people imposed on others who don’t believe. There’s an infinite number of religions in the world and each of them becomes a law that must be followed by everyone. Once it becomes a state religion, it also becomes a reason for oppression. Any religion says that if you don’t believe, you’re damned.
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| Religion, however, tries to give directives to be followed, such as not killing and so on… It tries to teach you to be a good person…
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| In order not to kill or to be a good person, there’s no need to follow a religion that requires you to behave in a way that you don’t feel yours or to believe in things that seem absurd. In the history of creation there’s an apple that is perhaps not an apple, a snake that perhaps isn’t really a snake, a naked man and woman and then there’s a tree that was the tree of knowledge. The essence of the Christian religion is: don’t keep yourself informed, don’t try to know. The whole problem of Adam and Eve arose when they tried to know, to think. The Christian religion doesn’t want to make you think, it makes you stupid.
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| I am sure that inside the church there are good people, good priests who really believe and who help poor people, but they are a minority. There are many priests, however, who own shares of banks or have something to do with finance. Most of the priests who help poor people come from the lower classes and therefore they help people of their own class. The church has so much money that they could help all people in need, if only they wanted to. Moreover, all the money they receive is tax exempt. They own about 70% of the artwork in Italy. If the role of the church is to take care of the poor people, they should use their money for good deeds. All their wealth comes from the generosity of the believers; therefore people should have the right to believe without paying. Every week, when you go to mass, the priest tells you that he needs offers for something. Once they have to repair the roof, another time it’s for a good deed and so on, they never stop asking.
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| Don’t you think that the money that the church collects on Sunday serves to help the poor people?
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| No, or at least I don’t think that all the proceeds are donated to the poor. Who can check the Sunday basket? At this point, to believe it or not is a matter of faith. Surely the people who go to mass on Sundays and leave money have faith and even trust in the church, which I do not. I believe the church works as if it were a franchise, like McDonald’s. Anyone who wants to open a church must send part of the profit to the head office.
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| I don’t think, however, that believers have so many problems or questions about where the money they gave will end up.
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| Probably those who make an offer to poor people unconsciously want to get rid of some of the original sin that the church has been telling to them ever since they were children. The original sin has probably been the best invention of the church.
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| As soon as the phenomenon of preachers in America has acquired gigantic proportions, you immediately came at them. These gentlemen are filthy rich and seemingly powerful. Aren’t you scared?
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| They don’t make me afraid. If they were to take me to court, I would behave as I’ve done so far with record companies. I would say to them: “Come and get me!”
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| But there’s nothing that you admire in them, for example the way they use the television medium?
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| They have a lot of style, that’s true. Anyone who has had the opportunity to see someone like Jimmy Swaggart will surely realize that he can pretend very well.
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| Have you seen the public scene of his return to family life after the scandal that had involved him with a prostitute?
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| No, but I can imagine the scene. This guy is a real actor.
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| Obviously you’re always very busy with the American “Moral Majority”.
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| At the moment, what pleases me most is that people have eventually realized the political-economic force hidden behind the evangelist movement, and start asking questions about some of their behaviors.
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| Why did you start again to urge young Americans to vote?
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| I saw a graph representing the percentages of voters in the industrialized areas of the world. The highest percentage is in Italy with 95% of the population, the lowest is America, with less than 30%. In the United States, if you want to vote, you have to go through several bureaucratic regulations, different state by state. The absurd thing is that you have to sign up for the vote in one of the two main parties, so that the parties already have from the beginning the projection of the percentages of the voters. The lowest electoral mass in the United States is represented by young people between the ages of 18 and 25. One of the reasons why young people are abstaining is that voter registration is only possible during working hours, in the town hall. If instead you bring the registration modules to a concert and take half an hour between the first and second part of the concert, at least 25% of the audience ends up registering.
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| We know that you have been approached by a political party, to possibly present it for presidency. Which was it?
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| It’s a party called “Libertarian”. The person who contacted me is a guy named Robert Murphy from Oklahoma. I liked the few things I knew about this party, so I agreed to meet with some of them. Then I realized that many of their proposals were stupid, so I preferred to thank them and leave.
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| I guess you don’t push the audience to vote for someone. But in a concert you mentioned the ones not to be voted…
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| Yes, but just during a concert, and it was one of the jokes in the show.
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| Changing the subject, have you ever regretted calling your son Dweezil?
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| No, never. I want to tell you the story of his name: Dweezil was born with a natural birth and in those days in the large and sophisticated Los Angeles there was only one hospital performing natural childbirth and giving the father the possibility to attend the birth. Before entering the hospital they asked us how we would call our son, and they said they would refuse to give birth to my wife if we had named him Dweezil. When he was 7, he realized that in his birth certificate there were four names and he went crazy, so we had to get a lawyer to change his name to Dweezil Zappa.
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| What inspired this strange name?
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| A toy of my wife.
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| And Moon, instead?
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| Moon was born two weeks after the start of my first European tour. Before leaving, my wife asked me how I wanted to call the baby, and I suggested Moon if a girl and Motorhead if a boy.
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| You have two other children, Ahmet and Diva, what do they do?
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| At the moment they are considering which prospects to give to their artistic career, even if together they don’t reach the age of 15 years. I limit myself to giving each member of the family simple “administrative” advices. In my career I’ve seen many rip-offs both from an artistic and an economic point of view. Consider Dweezil, for example, he started signing his first contracts and I noticed with pleasure that he took advantage of all the discussions he attended at home when he was very young. When he’s dealing, he begins like this: “You know that my father has sued all the major labels, don’t try to screw with me!” This makes me feel proud as a father.
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