short bits * short bits * short bits * short bits * short bits * short bits * short bits * short bits * short bits

• The Foolz (dutch zappa re-coverband) has a cd out ! It's called "Live In The Cherrytree"
  • tracks: heavy duty judy * keep it greasy * tryin' to grow a chin * dancin' fool * city of tiny lites * zoot allures * the torture * why does it hurt * drafted * more trouble * inca roads * peaches * tell me * bamboozled
  • more info soon
    
• The Foolz' Fanclub has made a tape available from a 2003/04/02 acoustic set the Foolz played in their rehearsal studio. The tape is called 'You Can't Beat The Boots Off Stage Anymore Volume 1', subtitled 'The Unofficial Bootleg – The FoolZ Unplugged Live In The Rehearsal Room'.  (Their site says: 'Quality sucks, Foolz Freaks Only')
  • tracks: peaches en regalia * joe's garage * why does it hurt when i pee? * tell me you love me * bamboozled by love * montana * zoot allures * dancin' fool * inca roads * elvis has just left the building * cosmik debris * let's move to cleveland * you didn't try to call me * suicide chump * jumbo go away * ms. pinky
  • more info soon
    
• And there's more Foolz Music at their web-site http://www.foolz.nl/
  • a "demotape": dancin' fool * inca roads * cosmik debris * zoot allures * tiny lites 1 * tiny lites 2 * alien orifice * cleveland
  • download stuff: bamboozled * tell me you love me * zoot allures * orifice * city of tiny lites
    
• I added a tracklisting for
  • geronimo black: welcome back (2)
        (1980, lp, usa, helios recs) - feat. various ex-mothers of invention
    
• The Reinecke Trio has an album out called "Reinecke Trio Live With Orchestra" on which they perform a Frank Zappa piece.  (the orchestra in question is called Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana)
  
• The brand-new latest album by the Reinecke Trio is called "Music From The Last Century" and also has a Zappa composition.
  
• 2003/09/07 radio show 'concertzender' (Dutch radiostation) had Corrie van Binsbergen as a guest. Corrie commented on the music that she had chosen (from Zappa to Stravinsky). The same radio show also presented a fragment of the Moers Festival concert of CVB4.
• Last Saturday, August 30, 2003, Corrie van Binsbergen performed 'I Wasn't Talking' (her answer to Frank Zappa's "Shut up 'n' play yer guitar") for solo guitar and tape. The previous performace of this piece was at the Holland Festival in 2000. This was broadcast on Radio 747 (Dutch radio station) on the Faros Cultuur radio show.
• Not satisfied? Read more about Corrie van Binsbergen at http://www.sofa.demon.nl/
  
• Dutch radio 4 (NPS) broadcasted the Fast 'n Bulbous concert from 2002/08/25. The Gary Lucas and Philip Johnston Captain Beefheart Project.
  
• Primus has rereleased their "Frizzle Fry" album.  It has 'Hello Skinny/Constantinople' as a bonus.
  (info: Ive Hapers)
  

JOHN TRUBEE INTERVIEW * JOHN TRUBEE INTERVIEW * JOHN TRUBEE INTERVIEW

John Trubee said:
“Old pal Bob Dubrow is interviewing me for LA-based SCRAM Magazine. He's feeding me the questions in chunks. You may not be interested in all this crap so please forgive the intrusion.
Forgive the rambling. Forgive the profanity. Or maybe not. Maybe you like those things..."

Trubee: His name was MIKE Trainor. And what about him? He was a fucked up little shitwad, that's what.
I was the camp bugler--I blew reveille at dawn and taps at twilight and meal calls throughout the day. I wasn't a really great horn player but I was all they had. I had taken trumpet lessons in school at my mother's insistence.
Mike Trainor one day was visiting the camp--he wasn't a regular camper at the time although he had been in earlier years. He showed up off of the Greyhound bus onto which his stepdad had shoved him just to be rid of him--at least for a while. Trainor stole the bugle I was using to sound calls (the bugle was camp property) and he pissed all over it--in it and on it. I had done nothing to goad him into this--this was a clever little stunt he dreamed up himself. I remember taking the
bugle down to the lake and swimming with it for a long time, repeatedly rinsing it with soap and flushing it with water--and it still stank of piss!
Evidently the powerful nitrogen compounds, ammonia, and uric acid in Trainor's piss had permanently bonded with the bugle's tarnished brass oxide, rendering it a new, hybrid musical instrument redolent of the potent urine stink of little brat Mikey.
Trainor was shortly thereafter put on an outbound Greyhound bus by head counselor Jim Duggan to ensure no more wanton damage to camp property by Little Asshole Mikey.

Q: When you say "Stay the fuck away unless you can be civil & decent," isn't that just another way of saying "I don't want you around unless you can accept me as a human being worthy of respect?"  This is what I mean by acceptance.  You know, John, you talk a very hard game in this interview and in your poems and song lyrics but I know you to be a gentle and giving person.  How do you reconcile that person with the angry posturing persona you present to the world in your art?

Trubee: There are 6 billion human beings on earth. We all have different temperaments and proclivities. We are all 6 billion unique individuals, different as snowflakes. We like to say of human beings that we are social creatures and require social interaction to be fully integrated, healthy, and human---but not all of us need the same QUANTITY of human interaction. I prefer as little human interaction as possible, as the tenor of my life experiences informs me that other human beings in general cause me greater sorrow and distress than happiness.
My greatest joy in life is creating music for which I need absolute solitude. I cannot dream or reflect or think for my projects with another person around distracting my thoughts. There's not a lot of people with whom I enjoy hanging out and the ones that I do hang with on occasion must be brilliant or talented or insightful or be an alienated freak.
For instance, not too long ago I spent a day in San Francisco hanging out in succession with 3 friends---Dennis Kitsz, an amazing composer & renaissance man; Brently Pusser, a longtime musician friend from Texas; and Kaos Kitty aka Kaosmik McKitty, an extraordinary performance artist and singer with a brilliant sense of humor and an astounding intelligence.
I also enjoy hanging out with Carl Franzoni and Catherine Huberty-- both of whom are talented poets and artists and photographers. 
I also chat regularly by phone with Zoogz Rift who verbally gores me and mocks virtually everything I say and I brutalize back at him-- yet we are still great friends.
I'm choosy about people with whom I hang out. They must be amazing. 

 The above sounds brutally snobbish and elitist and aristocratic-- so be it. I am a rarified aristocrat of my own world. I have learned to be discriminating and selective. It's my coping mechanism. 
He who is rejected learns to reject--and to discriminate.

That part of me which is warm and vulnerable I'd like to kill. It works against me when I'm negotiating for things I want-- especially with women. My heart is a happy dog which escapes his kennel at inopportune moments. My brain, the brutal Nazi, then goes to reign him in and stuff him back into his kennel where his drooling love can't thwart my need for toughness and clear thinking.
By then it's too late and the woman gives me the "let's just be friends" cliched bullshit routine and then goes on to fuck the heartless shitheels and moronic mediocrities of the earth.
This is why the world is full of shitheels and mediocrities.

Q: What were you reading during those early-mid teen years?  And who were your guitar heroes and why?

Huxley's 'Doors of Perception' and 'Brave New World', 'The Book' by Alan Watts, 'Listen, Little Man!' by Wilhelm Reich (a heartfelt tirade against the unnecessary cruelties of the world), '1984' by George Orwell, and other groovy subversive stuff.
I have no guitar heroes now. Heroes are for kids. We ought to emulate those qualities we most admire rather than vicariously admiring them in others. We all ought to live heroically every single day. Kids need to admire heroes because they require external models upon which to model their future behavior.
The term 'hero' in conjunction with a guy who plays guitar amazingly well is a misnomer. A hero risks himself for the welfare of others or to accomplish some formidable task. He shows courage by overcoming a potent fear of something dangerous. We all have fears; the hero overcomes his fears to accomplish something difficult and dangerous which often benefits others.
A great guitar player overcomes stage fright, maybe, and works his ass off to play ethereally---but this is not heroism in the true sense of the word.

Nonetheless, since you asked, I GREATLY ENJOY the guitar emissions of Eric Clapton from his Cream/Blind Faith/Derek & The Dominos glory days. When he became a junkie it sucked all the fire out of his playing. His guitar playing ever since his heroin rehab 3 decades ago is that of a tired and jaded and spoiled rock star. Sorry, Eric.

I love Hendrix's playing. Too bad he choked on his vomit. Drug abuse does that sometimes. I visited his grave in Renton, Washington like a ghoulish groupie.

Zappa, of course. I love his guitar playing and his prolific and amazingly varied musical output. For that I'll forgive his idiotic foray into politics (leave politics to the assholes who thrive on it), that he was an insufferable control freak, and that he occasionally said stupid things such as stating his belief that smoking has no connection to cancer.

Steve Vai, too, is an amazing guitarist. I met him a few times. The Ugly Janitors of America played on the same bill as his band at a Hollywood club eons ago.

Q: What was the genesis of the wild cartoon drawings you were doing at the time?  Man, that stuff was just hilarious and shocking, in much the same way your prank phone calls were at the time.  What was it that spurred you on to draw in this way and pick up the phone to "express yourself" to strangers on the other end?

I remember drawing pictures of 19th century sailing vessels when I was 7, 8, 9. I don't know what fascinated me about them. Maybe something romantic--that they represented a voyage and as a kid I was on the cusp of a great voyage--the journey of life.
Perhaps I started drawing the idiotic cartoon characters saying and doing idiotic things to be offensive and stupid to those around me.
I hated the adult world--their obsession with money and possessions, their grave lack of humor, their need to stifle any spark of life and spontaneity in their children, their incessant joylessness and Nazification of all life's grand purposes into some sort of control game in which we must always submit to others, heed the rules, keep up appearances, worry about what the asshole neighbors think, and become the soulless drones, the pod people, of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'.
The adult world was forever commanding me to sit down and shuttup.
It said I had no value except as a passive pawn in their scheme of things. I absolutely hated all their bullshit.

If this was what "society" was all about, I wanted no part of it. I felt a great chasm, a huge disparity between the values foisted upon me by my elders and what I felt was really vital and important in life. I needed to spew out my rage and disgust with their world and how I perceived it. People traditionally ignore and disparage children---yet children have thoughts and feelings which need to heard. There was a vast gulf between what I was told by my elders and how I experienced the world.

My obnoxious drawings were the only safe way I could say 'fuck you' to the world of mediocre normalcy and not get killed or locked in an institution. If I lacked creative outlets I would have killed somebody a long time ago.

The prank calls grew out of my fascination with tape recorders in the early 70's. I was getting interested in music and recording--- trying to discover how music was assembled, how things got recorded. I experimented recording my band "Gloop Nox & The Stik People'---sometimes micing amps, sometimes direct lining them, getting all sorts of awful noises from impedance mismatches, using crappy, cheap mixers from Radio Shack---4 pots and 4 inputs and 2 outs and nothing else! I obsessed about someday getting into a real recording studio. I still, to this day, have regular night dreams about recording my music and making records--I can't get it out of my system. They have supplanted what few yearning sex dreams I occasionally have. The dream women always leave me waking with a sense of sad longing. Now I long to get this music out of me or else I'll die.

Before I started recording my teen band I'd tape prank calls and send the cassette to you---then you and your brother John and the dipshit Axelrod brothers would erase over the cassette, record your own prank calls, then send 'em back to me. We lost hours of great early prank calls this way---but I have a number of the cassettes still in my archives--dating back to 1972! 31 fucking years! Jesus!
I recorded the prank calls out of a fascination with tape recorders and from the impish impulses typical of adolescent boys being awash in their first huge waves of testosterone. I wanted to start shit, I wanted to topple the established order, I was a moneyless slave in my Father's house crushed by rules and authoritarian imperatives.
I wanted to pull it all crashing down--not unlike a young ape chafing to subvert and attack and destroy the alpha male of his ape clan.
I discovered I could prank call a stranger, fuck around with him, record the whole madness for future amusement, to distribute by making and disseminating copies (essentially publishing), and this was as exciting and liberating to me as it would be for an inmate on death row to discover a secret escape tunnel from his cell the evening before his execution.
What prank calls taught me is that the rules are not ironclad--they only have the power over you that YOU ALLOW the assholes with their rules to have over you. Reality is malleable. Human interaction is subject to some of MY RULES and MY precepts for interaction-- that I could be the instigator, the creator of reality in the minds of others, that human social interaction is a game into which I could inject some of my play and madness and rage rather always being a passive slave at the mercy of THE RULES of others.
That I was able to record my prank calls and not be caught and suffer horrible shit consequences and die in Hell forever as implied by my elders let me start not allowing myself to not be so intimidated by them, as they were obviously full of shit.

This was the beginning of my love affair with freedom, my highest value.

the concert calendar * the concert calendar

• 2003/09/09 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘orpheum’, wien, austria
• 2003/09/10 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘orpheum’, wien, austria
• 2003/09/11 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘orpheum’, wien, austria  
  
• 2003/09/11 "Zappa Festival" in bordeaux, france
  • Les Polissons play Zappa (Bordeaux)
    La Campagnie des Musiques à Ouïr play Beefheart 
    Zappaventure (Eysines-Izon)  
    
• 2003/09/12 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘orpheum’, wien, austria  
  
• 2003/09/12 "Zappa Festival" in bordeaux, france
  • Children of Invention (Nice)
    Andy Emler (Paris) solo piano
    Nasal Retentive Orchestra (Poitiers) plays "Tales of Brave Flegmar", a theatrical piece based on Zappa’s oeuvre
    
• 2003/09/13 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘orpheum’, wien, austria
  
• 2003/09/13 "Zappa Festival" in bordeaux, france
  • Graphiose Band (Bordeaux)
    Gary Lucas (USA) plays Beefheart (co-production Musiques de Nuit Diffusion) solo guitar
    Zapping Buzzband (Suisse)
     
• 2003/09/15 belgian radio show 'cucamonga': magic band interview
  
• 2003/11/07 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘circus crone’, münchen, germany
• 2003/11/08 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘löwensaal’, nürnberg, germany
• 2003/11/09 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘steintorvariete’, halle, germany
• 2003/11/10 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘bka’, berlin, germany
• 2003/11/11 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘bka’, berlin, germany
• 2003/11/12 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘bka’, berlin, germany
• 2003/11/13 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘bka’, berlin, germany
• 2003/11/14 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘alter schlachthof’, dresden, germany
• 2003/11/15 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘millenium’, braunschweig, germany
• 2003/11/16 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘delphi’, hamburg, germany
• 2003/11/17 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘delphi’, hamburg, germany
• 2003/11/18 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘delphi’, hamburg, germany
• 2003/11/19 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘brückenforum’, bonn, germany
• 2003/11/20 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘stadthalle’, gersthofen, germany
• 2003/11/21 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘congressforum’, frankenthal, germany
• 2003/11/22 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘forum am schloßgarten’, ludwigsburg, germany
• 2003/11/24 sex without nails: "joe's garage" performance ‘hugenotten-halle’, neu-isenburg, germany
  
• 2003/11/28 psappha: "psappha plays zappa", Manchester, UK
  • "An evening of music by the world-renowned Frank Zappa performed by Psappha's 26-strong ensemble. The concert will include works from the Yellow Shark Album alongside arrangements new to the UK from the Frank Zappa estate."
    
• 2003/12/04 Asko Ensemble "Proms in Paradiso", 'Paradiso', Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • incl. compositions by Corrie van Binsbergen and Frank Zappa
    
• 2003/12/06 Asko Ensemble "Proms in Paradiso", 'Muziekcentrum', Enschede, The Netherlands
  • incl. compositions by Corrie van Binsbergen and Frank Zappa

  THREE DAY ZAPPA FESTIVAL IN BORDEAUX, FRANCE ( second edition)

info: Manu

just take a look at these bands:

Thursday september 11, 2003 
Les Polissons play Zappa (Bordeaux)
La Campagnie des Musiques à Ouïr play Beefheart 
Zappaventure (Eysines-Izon)

Friday september 12, 2003
Children of Invention (Nice)
Andy Emler (Paris) solo piano
Nasal Retentive Orchestra (Poitiers) plays "Tales of Brave Flegmar", a theatrical piece based on Zappa’s oeuvre

Saturday september 13, 2003
Graphiose Band (Bordeaux)
Gary Lucas (USA) plays Beefheart (co-production Musiques de Nuit Diffusion) solo guitar
Zapping Buzzband (Suisse)

EXPOSITIONS :
September 11 - 13: expo & video
August 19 - September 15: at the library: all the zappa album covers

MEETINGS/DEBATES
Saturday September 13, 2003
at 12:00h : book signing by Christophe Delbroucke and Guy Darol, who both published books on Zappa