By Allison Stewart
Chicago Tribune
Things have gotten so bad between guitarist Dweezil Zappa and his family that when their Laurel Canyon homestead was sold to Lady Gaga a few weeks ago, Dweezil heard about it online, like everybody else.
For a decade, Dweezil has been a mainstay in Zappa Plays Zappa, a touring tribute band paying homage to his father, Frank, who died in 1993. Dweezil and his mother, Gail, had long squabbled over, among other things, rights to the name “Zappa Plays Zappa.” Things worsened after Gail’s death in 2015. She left controlling interest in the Zappa Family Trust (ZFT) to his younger siblings Ahmet and Diva, relegating Dweezil and his sister Moon (known for her appearance on “Valley Girl,” one of Frank’s few hits) to lesser roles.
Dweezil and Ahmet, who used to be close, took the family feud public earlier this year. Ahmet says his brother need only pay a token fee of a dollar per year to use the “Zappa Plays Zappa” name; Dweezil says the ZFT wants more than a dollar, and all the tour merchandise profits, besides.
To Dweezil, the band, currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of Frank’s debut, “Freak Out!” is “a continuation of a relationship between me and my dad,” which makes everything even more painful and raw. Dweezil is calling his current tour “Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F%tK He Wants: The Cease and Desist Tour.” He recently talked about the growing schism in the Zappa family. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation:
Q: It must be heartbreaking to have this play out in public. Nobody wants that.
A: Well, it could’ve been avoided. It’s just really mind-bogglingly stupid how it all went down. It doesn’t make any sense. You can speculate it’s all about greed and power with the ZFT.
Q: When did it all start to go horribly sideways?
A: I started touring in 2006, and there was an agreement made for merchandise between my mom and myself. She was running ZFT. She disregarded the agreement and never paid my part of the merchandise for 10 years. When she passed away, Ahmet and Diva were running it, and I was hoping they would see the error of Gail’s ways and rectify the situation, but they chose to make it worse. They basically said, Gail didn’t honor the deal, and we’re not going to, either, and we’re going to continue to take 100 percent of the merch, and if you don’t allow us to do that then you can’t play the music at all. So I changed the name of the tour … then they went after me for the name change.
Q: Did things come to a head when your mom named them trustees?
A: The way that they’ve chosen to handle stuff, besides even stuff related to the tour, the way that they put the house up on eBay. They originally tried to sell the house for $11 million on eBay.
Q: Is it true that Lady Gaga just bought it?
A: I have no idea. We were not told anything about who bought the house.
Q: Is there any way you can sit down and straighten this out?
A: There’s not a lot of good possibilities at the moment, with the way that they’re handling stuff, and they’re being advised by the same legal team that my mom was advised by, and ran her into the ground to be more than $6 million in debt at her demise. There’s not a lot of good things going on over there.
Q: Is your father’s music not as well-known as it should be to younger generations?
A: The reason I started doing what I did … I would see that younger people wouldn’t have any idea of what my father’s music was about. Somebody under 30, if the name Frank Zappa came up, they would just say, “Who?” To me that didn’t sit well, because I felt my dad’s accomplishments in music should be better known, not just in a popular way, but better understood. If you only ever heard “Valley Girl,” or “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow,” or a song that has a comedic narrative, you would get some impression that that was novelty music, but that’s the only stuff that ever got on the radio. You can make the argument that that’s what has confused generations as to what his music’s about.
Q: So where do you go from here? Do both sides just hunker down, or does somebody try to settle this thing?
A: I have no idea. There’s too much on the other side that creates ongoing problems, you know? For example, I was given all of my dad’s guitars when he passed, and they were being stored at the house. My mother decided they were hers again, and she took them all back, and now they’re going up for auction.
Q: Do you have proof they’re now yours, or was it all within the family?
A: It’s all within the family. They all know, but they’re going to turn the other way. I ended up getting a couple back, my mom ended up giving me three, but not the ones I asked to be given. The ones I specifically asked for, Ahmet kept for himself. The rest are being auctioned. They wouldn’t even give me a chance to buy them at a different price. They said, “No, you can go on the auction just like anybody else.”
Q: What would your dad say about all this?
A: I think he would be completely disturbed by how things went, especially what my mom did during the time she was running the ZFT, and how it’s transpired after that. It’s just another bit of disgrace, really.
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