Dweezil Zappa
Virtuoso guitarist Dweezil Zappa is obliged to respond to two questions his whole life:
1. Yes, that's his real name.
2. Yes, his dad is Frank Zappa, one of rock's greatest musician/composers.
Whether releasing his own solo albums, guesting on other people's records or attempting to honor the music of his late father through the Zappa Plays Zappa act, Dweezil is an industrious artist.
"With Zappa Plays Zappa we really haven't played a bad show because everybody is so focused on doing the best job possible. If we're going to give ourselves a hard time and say it wasn't a good show, it's still far better than a lot of other things. We never go up there and have a total train wreck. You might miss a few parts here and there, but that's because they're fucking hard. Outside of that ... I generally try not to get involved in things that I don't like. ... We've had things that have happened that you can't control. Like we played in Roanoke, Virginia -- I'm pretty sure that's where it was -- and we played one song and I stepped on my volume pedal to turn it down so I could change guitars. Then the next song starts and I have no sound. I'm thinking maybe a cable or something is weird. Forty-five minutes later, I still have no guitar sound. At that point we have techs onstage, and I've been conducting the band and doing stuff. But we finally had to resort to putting on house music for a minute while we're completely taking apart my guitar system. Come to find out what it was is there's a little thread in the volume pedal that is part of the mechanism that when you turn it on or off this thread is involved. And it snapped leaving it stuck in the off position. That's the last thing you think of when it comes to 'let's find the problem.' Forty-five minutes later that was, 'Well, let's look at the volume pedal.' We had that little 45-minute snafu, then we played for another two hours after we got it fixed."
— Dweezil Zappa
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