The Smiley Smile Message Board

is a new kickstarter project. (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alexwinter/frank-zappa) It's a documentary being made by Alex Winter, who you may remember starring opposite Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures. Seriously. Anyway, he's looking to raise money to fund the making of the film, which includes a deep dive into Zappa's vault (which is now being relocated). Apparently, this is a last-ditch effort to digitize everything before it all crumbles into dust or something.

A lot of the prizes, if you read between the lines, make me a bit sad. It seems that, now that Gail has passed, they're just trying to empty out a bunch of sh*t that's taking up space, and they're letting the fans have it. I mean, you can even buy the house. It's $9 million. You can't buy the house.

Anyway, what I'm most interested, and the reason I'm posting this in the first place, is the archive he's promising to create. For every $500,000 the kickstarter raises, he's promising to upload an hour of new Frank Zappa music from the vaults. There's no indication as to what that will actually be, as he seems unsure of what he'll actually find. Anyway, it's $25 to join this exclusive archive group, and if you're a fan of Zappa's music, $25 ain't bad for an hours worth of new material (and potentially a couple hours more, all the way up to 6).

Maybe the film will be good too. I dunno.

I had read an article about the documentary and Kickstarter aspect, but haven't gotten to the page yet to check it out. And was entirely unaware of the uploading: cool.

In some nostalgic way, it'll be sad to know the UMRK is gone. On the other hand, I talk sh*t about nostalgia all the time; Frank and Gail are gone; the kids are grown; and I've never been there (and won't ever go there unless I'm the buyer, which I won't be) anyway, so oh well. Glad it'll be taken care of, though. The archives belong in a university.

EDIT: Except of course Frank wasn't a big fan of the educational system, so a university is unlikely...

Hey, I hate nostalgia, too.

From what I read, I believe all of Frank's stuff is being moved over to "Joe's Garage." Which I think is Joe Taver's place?

Also, I wanna point out that the project, within a day or two of its launch, is already almost halfway to reaching its goal.

Joe Travers, that would make sense. He's been the "vaultmeister" forever.

Sign me up, I love Zappa!

Seriously, though, who the f*@% is Frank Zappa?

...

I know. But it's true. I heard his name mentionned a lot but never listened to any of his music (I don't think). Any particular album I should start with?

With dozens to choose from spanning many styles, it's really a matter of taste. Freak Out, We're Only In It For The Money, Uncle Meat, Hot a Rats, The Grand Wazoo, Apostrophe, Overnite Sensation, Joes Garage, Civilization Phaze III...plenty of others.

I'd suggest Apostrophe as a fairly safe place to begin. Co-engineered by Stephen Desper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zb3aAM0aHY

Dweezil Zappa is on Marc Maron's March 10 WTF podcast. There's a funny little anecdote when Maron asks him about Frank's and Beefheart's relationship. It's just in passing, but it's along the lines of:

"The phone would ring and on the other line you'd hear, 'Umm...Dweezil?' 'Yeah.' 'There's a platypus in my briefcase.' And even as a kid, you'd just put the phone down. 'Dad, Captain Beefheart's on the phone for you...'"

 :lol

The project is now over 80% of the way funded. The director, Alex Winter, promised on Tuesday to post more details about what would be uploaded into the digital vault the following day (that would be Wednesday, for those of you keeping track at home), but he's been silent for about three days now.

I've moved my pledge down to the $10 level.

At first, he promised to have up to an hour of new material for every $500,000 raised, but now he's changed it to 30 minutes and 10 scanned documents. Yesterday, he promised to show us a new, never-before-seen something, which turned out to be a video recording of "Titties and Beer." Fine, but he recorded the video playing on a computer monitor with a handheld camera and uploaded that. Really? This is not what I envisioned when I pledged money.

$10 will at least keep me on the email list for future updates, but I may end up pulling out entirely before it's over.

Fuckin' Bill. Or Ted. Whichever.

Today's bit of material is from 1967 and is a recording of a brief conversation between Eric Clapton and Frank Zappa about, among other things, voice being the least imaginative part of music. I think it's an interesting point. They then play acoustic guitars together for a while. I was disappointed by yesterday's thing, but now they're giving me exactly what I want. I'm no fan of Clapton's, but this era for Frank might is one of my favorites. The acoustic guitar session resembles what he did with Shuggie Otis a couple years later.

Just when I thought I was out...

They finished with about $1,210,000. They're done with the live stream, but you can watch it here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMozFXr_tds&nohtml5=False&ab_channel=WhotheF*@%isFrankZappa?), if you so desire. They played an incredible "King Kong/Son of Mr. Green Genes/Chunga's Revenge" medley early on in the stream from the Roxy performances. And then Diva said some stuff that made everyone cry but not me because I'm masculine and my eye muscles have closed up my tear ducts allright itearedup dontyoujudgeme

Joe says they're working on creating a complete audio collection of the Roxy performances, and the Uncle Meat project/object is going to happen so yay. They also talked about releasing a P/O for Hot Rats, Rage & Fury, and his live appearance with Pink Floyd back in 1969.

They found three, previously-unknown pieces of soundtrack work for Cronenberg's The Fly that Frank composed, and played them during the stream.