So now we will go over and open up the lines just before we go into Zappa. Let's see if anybody, we've got a few people here. Would you anybody want to comment on what you've heard? Hi. Oh, Santa's here from the German Economy of Scale. Do you have something to comment on what we did? Yes, actually I think we could link with many of the things you were talking about. Okay, good. Yes, that fits here. So just before you start, Rossi, let's see if someone else, because once we start this app, I thi
nk we shut down the lines and we become a solo effort only allowed to be penetrated by Burt. Or is it Bart? No, Burt. So Ginny and Greg, do you have anything to say? Sean, do you have anything to say? And whoever else is on here as an unavailable, blocked situation. Hi, Bob. It's Sean. Hi, Bob. Okay. First, I'll go with Ginny. Yes, Ginny. as an unavailable blocked situation. Hi Bob, it's John. Hi Bob. Okay, first I'll go with Ginny. Yes Ginny, you have something to say? Hi Bob, Greg and I were l
istening. Yeah, I thought it was interesting, the whole recap of INDEM. Is that the last segment on Carolyn Gorton? Oh no, no, Carolyn's just halfway through the book. This is gonna go on for a few more weeks. Carolyn's enjoying reading the book. She hasn't finished it, and she's finding all kinds of interesting things she likes to talk about. So, what, you want us to end soon? No, I don't want you to end. I was curious. It didn't sound like it had come to any conclusion. I was just curious. No,
but we're part of what Gwerton is talking about. This is conversational processing. There's no finish point in this. It's only when you realize what the end conclusion is, I and Dume, that you can step out of the addictive nature of the participatory conversation. Okay. Okay, I'm catching on. Somebody told me iON was going to be on tonight. Is that a yes or a no? iON was going to be on, but then unforeseen events put it off. we're hoping next week. I can't promise anything, but iON is going to
be here pretty soon. It's just a matter of the fine-tuning of the incidents that evoked this IONIC fast. Very nice. Okay. Sounds wonderful. But you should be engaging with us anyways. I've decided to say that when iON isn't here, Payday is a Bob cult. When I'm here without iON, it's a cult. When iON comes in, it's not a cult. So I recommend people... And what is the value of saying it that way, services and disservices? What is the value of saying that it's a Bob cult? Well, most people think iO
N's a cult, and Bob is the liberator from the iON cult. Actually, the way I run the thing here, it could be conceived, I do want people to talk about and point to me as the punchline here. So that definitely sounds like a cult, but because it isn't really a cult, I don't mind pretending it is. And iON's the one who has to be careful about appearing a cult or not, I could easily become a cult somewhere in the universe from its own power. So the services are that one should learn to engage a cult,
put on the cult, adopt its mores like the old thing was when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Well, when you're in a cult, practice suppressing your ridiculous little personal opinions and merge with the occult and make yourself the leader of the occult. All right, so just start to learn. Okay, well I think I've done a great job at that. Yeah, I can give myself an A on that score. I'm good. Yes, you infiltrated a cult, yes. Now you're in leadership position. Yeah, and then I can do the party line
and stuff like that and I don't talk about myself personally anymore and all those other things. All right, very good. I did well. I got a good score on my scorecard. That's all I'm here to do is just check in and see if I'm still part of the cult. Yes, and remember, you also practice not being a cult, quadrophenically. You just have to self-hold the ability. That's right, I do that in my non-time, in my non-radio time that I'm very uncult-like, yes. Oh, okay, sorry. Do I have to do it here, too
? No comment. Okay. That's for you to find out. You have to see the consequences of attempting to do it or not doing it. Uh-oh, there's very harsh consequences of the cult, so I want to make sure I do it the right way. That's right, very good. Right. very good. Very good. And remember, we have one big act of deception, so my rules may be setting you up for something you didn't foresee. Because you leave my rules. That has happened before, yes, I'm very aware of that. All right, excellent, excell
ent. Well, very good, so I hope people, new people who are listening to this are thoroughly delighted at the complexity that we present and want to engage. That's right. That's right. Yes, and Roxy's very good at presenting complexity too, so that'll be good. Are you going to talk about Zappa some more? Of course. We're going to do it. Well, gosh. And you're not interested in Zappa, but there's something you should engage. You should start to. We don't want you to my quadraphenic non-cult behavi
or Bob we already have discussed this this is my that's too easy no it's very we mark you on what you attempt to put on as your detached non-cult behavior Zappa is too easy to reject. Oh no, it's so hard to reject Bob because Zappa is just so awesome. You just don't know how hard this is for me to maintain this rejectory status. Oh okay, yes, I can agree with that because you did, out of the blue, denounce Zappa about three months ago, wasn't called for. You've been an apparent fan. Yes, I see y
ou're under great strain trying to maintain this anti-Zappa position. Okay, that's clever. All right, we'll see what happens. Don't get your blood analyzed. Do not get your blood analyzed. No, I'm not going to the doctor, very good. Okay, well very good, we'll see if anybody else, so Sean had something to say. Sean, you not going to the doctor, very good. Okay, well, very good, we'll see if anybody else, so Sean had something to say. Sean, you were going to opine. Yes, Bob, it's just all those,
this Carolyn Gwerton book, while this whole series has been going on, I saw how easy it was to go into that mindset of the whole Oprah Winfrey thing, wanting to make money out of something and using the Internet. But then at the same time, you sort of taught me to not go against it too much or make it another problem. But just... Okay, let me understand you. ...you know, put it in its place. Yeah. You attempted to become an Oprah Winfrey? Is that what you just said? Yeah, well, you know, the who
le famous thing. I want to be famous and... Oh, did you genuinely want to be famous? Yeah. Yeah, well, I think everyone wants this. Okay. So I think it's okay for the right reason. Yeah, just a whole load of money and you think then everything's sorted because you have money to fix all your problems. Right. So it's an illusion. How did you realize it was an illusion? Well, you would put things... You did a whole session on it on one of the Watch Youth shows, probably three months ago. And you ju
st really went into it. And I just saw it clearly and then sort of stepped out of it a bit, because I was busy building a website. Well, you were trying to make a documentary on me and become famous through that. Are you still doing the documentary or did you give up on that? Oh yes, oh yes, the R&A song. It's halfway there and it's really good. Oh, so you're still making it? Let's just say that, yes, my daughter, she started it and she's going to finish it. And the person she is when she's fini
shing it is a much more person that's engaged in the jobs and she's different. So it's going to be very real. Yeah, it's going to be different from what she thought she was gonna make. Yeah, and the shots we did in the beginning, she was still in an old mindset. So it all works out. And lots of things that I had to find out in between about the radioactive and all that stuff. Right, that's the service of the conversational nature of the Android Meme. People can talk themselves in circles and act
ually learn things because they go back over and rediscover things because there's enough time to express yourself and then make these pattern recognitions. So we're endlessly learning things about this self-awareness process that the Android Meme provides for us. So many people make a goal, and as Barry Nevitt said, plan very carefully what you're gonna do and prepare to do the opposite. See, that happened to your daughter. And we do so much information processing that that kind of learning abo
ut flipping into the opposite is inevitable. So we have produced a very super sophisticated population of producer maniacs that have nowhere to go and are wondering why the co-anesthetes, not the synesthetes, the co-anesthetes, the integrators are so silly and obsolete in their methods. And we hear that on Carolyn's show every week. She can just take any recent quote from some doctor and they show their ignorance in appalling levels. So we're all learning the punchline, the I and M punchline, an
d then trying to figure out how to survive with that knowing. You get that, John? Yeah, yeah, definitely. And for me, it's making it real. So if you just go off on that Oprah Winfrey thing, you just, part of the plasticness of it all for me. But if you make it real and you don't settle until it's real, and it's a very, sometimes you get very uncomfortable because you set rules of where you're supposed to be. As soon as you notice that and break the rule and just go with the ease again, then you
just get into that flow of non-stop and just go. And you may become famous accidentally and that'll be a challenge for you, how you handle that. Hopefully you'll learn from us how to be able to handle and make fun of it as it's happening. Yeah, definitely. The end in mind is you just want that place on your island like you guys. That's what you want yearly. Well I would say you already have it. You just have to start pretending that you have it in many ways. You don't have it perfectly but you c
ould start to hallucinate on your own immediate environment and pretend you have it. Wish fulfillment. You better start fantasizing that you're living in Maui. Oh, I do. Okay, that's very good. All right, thank you, Sean. Thanks. Now, I think all this stuff we can use, Roxy. So let me just see if this person wants to say something. That's... Who is Newark? Is that Uri? Who just came in? 973. No, it's Tim Box. All right, Tim, we haven't got much time, but you have something to say? No, I just got
on. I didn't hear what you guys were talking about. Did you say you don't have any idea? No, I didn't have any idea what you guys were talking about. I just hopped on. Okay, well you listen to the archive. What we talked about the last ten minutes was pretty good. Okay, so we're now going to mute people and start with the... All participants are now muted. ...reality. Did I... Is that Roxy, this one, this unavailable? Yes, everything is complementing our... Yes. ...exploration. So I will let yo
u begin. You have a lot to say. You have a lot to say already based on what you've been hearing, so you take it away. It is the beginning of the ZAP Hour. Go ahead. I was thinking of the Thunders and how the Thunders were explored by McLuhan and Zappa, and how their works, in a way, are exposing all the genesis of the logos and the different medias from the fall until the Ionic. And in the book, Culture is Our Business, McLuhan does very interesting explorations by presenting acts and making ver
y short comments. He's explaining the environment, and in a way I find a lot of similarities with the work of Frank Zappa. And Frank Zappa had this great concept of the conceptual continuity, which is also what McLuhan was doing. Like all of his books are at the end, one big work as well as all of the music of Frank Zappa is one big work. And I was thinking how the production of both of them in a way show the effects of the electric environment. Because I was editing the video we did on the book
of electric environment done by Eric McLuhan. And yeah, I was thinking and seeing how both Marcin McLuhan and Frank Zappa are actually commentating on all these effects with their works. And I would like today to talk about this, the thunders, how they somehow are making a summary of the effects of the thunders and this odyssey we have been going through. Right. Are you referring to the thunders in the book of Revelation, as well as the thunders in Finney's Wake? Which ones are you referring to
? Yes, to all of them, because I am said in the Genesis, your work is about taking us back to the tree of knowledge. For me, that was really intriguing, and now I understand why he meant that. And McLuhan saw in the work of Joyce and in the Genesis in the Bible, this whole metanoia of the appearance of technologies. And he saw how the Genesis is all about appearing technologies, how men start agriculture and clothing and constructing and all these different technologies appearing. His approach o
f his explorations of trying to explain to the fish the thing, the thing he, he could not really, he saw there is more than just this phenomenon of the environment. There is something behind that. And he saw it's in the logos, that is this link that connects us to what we now call the non-physical, but he had a more catholic view of what is really happening. And although he didn't say it openly in the book of the Synesthesia and the Soul, Eric McLuhan is linking the soul with all these explorati
ons of his father. So like, behind that exploration of the whole history of media, he had another agenda. Like he was trying to understand this connection with the real formal cause. Yes. That's a pretty good statement. Are you waiting for a reaction now? Yes. Okay. Well, let's react by looking at the next, say, 22 names on the FREECO list to see if it fits in because that's very good the way you link the thing and the fish, which is Zappa's work, the thing fish. And also was the cover of Trout
Mask Replica, his buddy that Frank produced in 1969, the album where Captain Beefheart is wearing a fish mask. That's why the album is called Trout Mask Replica. And they're showing that somebody has been kicked out of the water and is in dire straits. And McLuhan was using the same metaphor. So that's what was intriguing back then in 69. I'd be reading the new book by McLuhan, War and Peace in the Gold Village. It came out, I think, in the summer of 68. It came out in 68, probably the summer. S
o I'm reading it through the next few months into early 69, and a big part of it at the end of the book is about the message to the fish fresh out of the water. So it was very intriguing that these, in relation to McLuhan, these teenagers, Beefheart and Zappa, these young guys in their mid-20s, show that image on this, what's considered one of the greatest albums ever made, when Rolling Stone does the Top 100. Beefheart's 12-Mass Replica is considered a colossal masterpiece and innovation. And Z
appa and him did it together. And there he is with a fish mask on. It's like a human being, the chemical body, still trying to be a fish. No longer can be a fish in the new situation, but they're trying to put the fish head back on, right? And all of the retroactive, nostalgic movements of the late 60s were attempts to put the fish head back on. Get me back in some water that I can be oblivious to. So that's what's interesting. Yes, and Zappa said don't trust the fish people. But... Out of the b
lue he said that, that's right. Don't trust the fish people. But... Out of the blue, he said that. That's right. I tried to fish people. Another thing that this type of similarities between McLuhan and Cepa, I don't know how well they both knew each other's work. But there is a lot of maybe in their producing and consuming, they somehow had the same type of altering. Because for McLuhan, the mother of invention, and I think he said, actually this phrase, is the love lowest in 1977. And I was sur
prised to see McLuhan using that model of invention. That was the name of the front. Okay, a couple of little anecdotal things. In McLuhan never, Marshall McLuhan never talked about Frank, but you never knew what Marshall was aware of. Maybe if some student had brought up Zappa, McLuhan would have talked about it. But I do know that Eric McLuhan, his son, said in a class back in 1978, 79 to some art students in Toronto that he was trying to explain a menippean satire. And he cited the album, We'
re Only for the Money, which is Zappa's satire of the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Eric cited that as an example of menippean satire. So Eric himself knew. Whether he discussed it with his father is another point, but that's close enough. If Eric's saying it, then it's in McLuhan's awareness, or McLuhan, if he was, if Eric told him about it, he'd understand it. Okay, so there's that anecdote. Also, Bucky Fuller had a book about him, the same people who made The Mediumism Massa
ge and Warm Peace in the Global Village, Quentin Fury and Jerome Agell, those combination of picture and text, which was innovative in graphics history. In retrospect, there's a book on the McLuhan book and the Bucky Fuller book. So there was a book of Bucky Fuller's quotes, and in it, Bucky Fuller has a statement And in it, Bucky Fuller has a statement by Frank Zappa. Bucky Fuller or the people, maybe Bucky had nothing to do with the book. Jerome Adriel and Quentin Fiore may have been aware of
Frank. And Frank says something like, all the technician pawns of the scientific establishment. So he was talking about people getting jobs at best. They would just be technician pawns. I think that was his phrase. I have the book out in the garage. You could probably find it. That people were technician pawns of the present corporate structure. So pawn is a servo mechanism. That's what McLuhan was pointing out, how people were servo mechanism of their technologies. So Bucky Fuller's people knew
to quote Frank Zappa. But it's interesting, what do you call that awareness that McLuhan and Zappa had? Whereas McLuhan had it quite consciously, Zappa had it by default because he allowed himself to catch up to what McLuhan was seeing, not as coldly as McLuhan, but equally presenting the same awareness in his artifacts that he made as much as one could express with the Gutenberg arts, electrified. So there never was a discussion, as far as I know, between McLuhan and Zappa, other than the lunc
heon that I put on at Stanley's in the Village on June 18, 1967, where Christian Murti spoke to all the holy offices, Beter, McLuhan, Herbert Armstrong, LaRouche, I have them all there. You can look it up in my diaries. But I don't recall any of them really talking to each other. There's a bit of discussion, and they each say their bit, but they didn't stay around to interact with each other, and they didn't know who each other was at that point. People didn't become aware of Frank Zappa until 1
968, 69 in the world of McLuhan, you know, the older academic world. And this was- And it's interesting how they both explore the same analogic plunders all the medians that they somehow still used, like the Telegram, the telephone, the TV, and McLuhan says, culture is our business, and Zappa says, we are here for the money. But in a way, they were predecessors of what's going on now with the 12th Thunder. You're in the new era where the production and distribution has become cheaper and everybo
dy has access to these mediums and everybody's producing. And as you say, the consumer, the audience is also producing. Yeah. And the vortex is even more chaotic and there is much more big data. And the effects of all this have to be balanced by the Ionic. And this is the new situation that they were already somehow seeing, but they stopped with the antiretrovir, and then you come to complement them with the ionic. And they're making this metanoia of seeing the effects of all the analogic median
s in the environment to somehow explain to the tribe the hidden effects of the new environment. Now you take Bob Dylan, and I get a particular point here, in 1965-66. Dylan now says that he doesn't know who that was that made those great albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. He says, he was interviewed in 60 Minutes 10 years ago or something, and he says, I don't know that mind that made that, And I certainly couldn't do it again. So Dylan basically freak
ed out. He became famous with the song, Like a Rolling Stone. And Frank said, if this song does the work it should do, when he heard it in 1965 or so, he said, if this does the work, then I don't have to be a, then I don't have to be a composer. I don't have to be a musician, or I don't have to engage in a public musical role. He decided after a year or so that the people didn't get Dylan's message. And so he said, well, maybe there is something for me to do. Well, we'll just redo Dylan a little
more appropriately or something. So Frank corrects Dylan's freeco, something for me to do. Well, we'll just redo Dylan a little more appropriately or something. So Frank corrects Dylan's freak out because Dylan admits that he went on, he got out of control and he had his motorcycle accident and then he retired from the scene. And he said later, a few years later, that he was not aware as he should have been, even though he was an archetype of super awareness through his art, his music. So Dylan
freaks out. So then Frank comes back and is going to redo Dylan, but he's going to name what's going on. He's going to call it Freak Out. And so he puts out an album, or he starts making an album in February of 67 that is delayed by corporate complications, so it doesn't get actually released until 68. But the very same time, February, March 67, McLuhan is part of an album that's going to do the same thing. Here's Frank talking about people, telling him how to freak out comprehensively with awa
reness and McLuhan comes in and explaining why people are freaking out so in that book the medium is a massage there's a picture of Dylan the famous profile picture of him and the makers Jerome age old and Quentin fury quote the Dylan song ban a ballad of a thin man Where it says you know mr.. Jones? You don't know what's going on forget the guy's line, Ballad of a Thin Man, where it says, you know, Mr. Jones, you don't know what's going on. Forget the guy's line, hey Mr. Jones, whatever it is,
you don't know what's going on. So McLuhan takes that quote that Dylan wrote and superimposes over Dylan's face, saying that you, Bob Dylan, don't know what's going on. So it's very interesting that Dylan didn't, and even later, he didn't know what was going on. So Dylan freaked out first, became famous, and then had to become confused and bothered by the fame that happened. So Frank comes in, and McLuhan at the same time, making albums a year later after Dylan's, and they're saying, if know if
we're successful, we'll know what kind of fame we'll get, but we will not be hypnotized by it. We will not be subjected to it. At best, I'll become president of the United States, says Zappa, and I'll use it against the Android Meme. So I'm looking at this book called Freak Out. A freak out in the making is a bubble coming out of Frank Zappa's head. And this book by Scott Parker inventories the 179 people that Frank said helped him understand what was happening in the mid-60s. Now, McLuhan lists
about 178 people, 179 people in his writings. He has many, many, many sources that he quotes, as many as Frank, not the same, but they overlap a little bit. So you have this interesting pattern. The guy that produced Like a Rolling Stone, Tom Wilson, he's the black engineer producer who makes Dylan's album, the song, Like a Rolling Stone, a big hit. He then goes and produces Frank Zappa's album, Freak Out, right after doing Dylan. So Tom Wilson is the common ground. He's there when Dylan by def
ault becomes supremely perceptive. And then he goes over and does the remake of Dylan by Frank. And in the middle of it is a guy named John Simon who works with Tom Wilson, and he produces McLuhan's album, the one in early 67. You have this nexus of people touching, interacting with each other. That's incredible. You get what I'm saying here? Yes. It's so close. And you know, John Simon, we actually, Mark Stallman and I called him up a few years, maybe 2005, 2004, called him up. He lived outside
New York City and asked him about that, experience of working with McLuhan. And no quotes come to mind. He said that he would be interested in being interviewed about it, but he couldn't do it right now, he's very busy. He went on to produce a lot of other famous people, John Simon, but he had this McLuhan album in his resume. So you have John Simon and Tom Wilson and Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan. It's a tetrad. Dylan causes an interruption, then that causes a disturbance, which retrieves capture
and leakage. Dill himself gets captured and it flips into, and puts you to the extreme, it flips into the mothers of invention. And you're right. McLuhan is writing about the history of inventions and what needs an invention brings into a society and what necessities. And Frank does not want to call himself the mothers of invention. It didn't occur to him. It's just that the record company forced him to drop the name Mothers because it had obscene implications, the name Mothers. So he had to add
of invention. So he ends up working for the McLuhan Media Analysis, Media Ecology, Zine,ine and Zine by his choice of band name, Mother's Invention. And all this is happening when Rai is returning to the plane of essence. Rai is here in Maui, acting out through Ralph Duby the end of the individual, the end of some kind of literate artistic genius archetype. And so, Cosmic Awareness is discussing, forget what I was gonna say about 10 minutes ago, but you have to bring in Dave Worcester and Cosmi
c Awareness in the mix of this too. So when Frank started to become prominent, I saw Frank as an afterimage of Rai. I saw saw Frank as an afterimage of Raii. I saw McLuhan as an afterimage of Raii. This is when I was in the cosmic awareness quadrant and made them the ground. You can look at the tetrads that I do on each one of them. What happens when you make cosmic awareness the hidden ground of an ongoing conversational process? So there's the Raii returning to essence and the four different a
spects of it. Go ahead. Another thing that I see with this RIE coming back to essence is somehow the electric environment not only is dissolving the gulf, but it's actually somehow turning on the audience. And Matthew insists that the electric environment demands audience participation, and that's a big thing for Zappa. That the audience is not only a passive consumer, but it's part of creating the concert or the performance. Yeah, the collective Freak Out. Yes, and yeah. No, that's really good,
you bring in, what did you just say about RAE? That's exactly. Yeah, it's dissolving the cough. There are like. Oh, yes, cough. There are like invisible effects. That's actually what it does. RIE is the end of the guff. When the plane of essence reabsorbs the isis and RIE, there's no separateness. There's no death. There's no life. There's no difference. So that is the meaning of cosmic awareness and that's being said right at the time that McLuhan and Zappa are acting out the artist archetype
and that's a very good point to make. That led to the guff coming forth to speak and that's where iON 40 years later completes the Rai-IE returning to essence. And ends up... The electric environment demands audience participation and even the non-physical is talking, like you say, I want everybody to talk and even the non-physical comes and starts speaking. Starts talking. But another of the things that happens is that this electric environment, for example, the radio, the TV became 24-hour env
ironment. Yes. You cannot turn them off anymore. And it became like the moussak, it's this environment that is there, but at the same time it's just background, it's just, it's not to be really understood at least, it's just a background noise. Like the way the guff was. The guff was not supposed to be talked about, you know, you had to go to become a monk and go into a esoteric spiritual exercises to engage the Reality of the guff which for most people was just a background annoyance Oh, yeah,
I want to say I'm going to die. That's all they got with now when people talk about the second coming they never imagined the second coming would be come forth people talk about the second coming, they never imagine the second coming would be, come forth and talk about Marsh McLuhan and Frank Zappa. Say, and there's the weirdness of it. Yeah, let me just say this. Let me add this sentence just to complete it. So people became aware of Zappa and McClone at the same time, 67, 68, 69. They both wer
e global icons, to the degree anybody noticed an icon, because most people were getting into their own particular lifestyles and participating themselves and narcissistically engaging their own sovereignty. So then iON comes forth to discuss what happened when Raii returned to Essence and is forced to talk about McLuhan and Zappa. So the people that knew about McLuhan and Zappa never would associate them with the Second Coming. But when the Second Coming happened, that was one of the main things
that the Aion had to talk about, thanks to to me forcing them to deal with McLuhan and Zappa and Finnegans Wake. That's the joke, is that nobody predicted that the, once Zappa and McLuhan are known, late 60s, nobody from 1970 on said, well, when Jesus comes back, he's going to be really keen on discussing McLuhan's media calls and Zappa's obscene form of music. All the time we're doing it. Go ahead. And as you said, for the Greek, Logos was the mythic. Both McLuhan and Zappa understand this myt
hic as altering which are not only the spoken word but all types of technologies and creations. The mythic, yes. Myth is the environment, the complex condensation of many media that a culture uses. That's right, mythic. That was McLuhan's course in school, Media and Myth. And Frank, he didn't use the word myth, but he was constantly saying, every 18 months there'll be a new fad. And he meant by that a new myth. And he's there on duty piercing whatever fads come down the pike. You know, he did th
at for 25 years, satirizing, puncturing the myths that the Android Meme created. McLuhan did the same thing. And so Zappa is like a high school teacher in a non-school environment, the rock and roll world. Most people didn't see that as school. But Frank was a teacher. He became into that world as a teacher he laid out his first album the people you should read and study now mcclure was a teacher and he went into the global classroom and didn't act like a teacher so they both reverse roles zappa
a juvenile delinquent just gets out of jail and uh... is going to infiltrate the culture and appear to be a ripoff ad man, you know, an exploiter, but he's actually an educator. His source is not education per se. McLuhan is obviously an educator, writes about it, causes a revolution in education, and comes forth and people think that he's abandoned his educational pedagogic agenda and become a nut. So both, McCloughan was more conscious of the process than Zappa, but he was considered a guy wh
o freaked out. Zappa was a guy not as conscious of the factors that McCloughan described, but appeared to be not freaking out. You see, they cross, there's this, Zappa becomes part of the monkeys TV show, and this is 67, 68, and there's a scene on the show where Mike Nesmith, one of the monkeys is wearing a Zappa mask and Zappa is wearing a Mike Nesmith monkeys mask. All right, so you're looking at them to see each other. It's very interesting how McLuhan and Zappa both see the electric environm
ent and its effects are somehow hidden. Are there 24 hours like a moussak educating the people, programming the people? But they both see that the advertisement is the new art form of this cape. And like the ancient paintings in the caves, they were hidden. And this electrical environment is like, make us like Alice in Wonderland and Maxine is saying, we are in the same situation as Alice. We're in a weird environment, we don't really understand. And like Alice, we just cry when we are transform
ed and metamorphosed. And he quotes a lot of songs, of lyrics, to illustrate this, how people love these crying songs, love songs, to express this discomfort of the frequency of the electric environment. And Zappa, on the contrary, he makes fun of that. Yeah, you're saying that McLuhan quotes the songs. Yes. Yes. In Cultures of Business, for example. Well, in different books. Yes, he does. There's a famous song in the 20s, All Alone by the Radio. He says the well of loneliness that the tribal ac
oustic space that was retrieved by radio was a shocker to people. And then there was this song of All Alone by the Radio, and McLuhan said that was the well of loneliness that visual man fell into when they fell back into acoustic space with inside the tactile effect of electricity. And then Zappa was always making fun of the crying Susie Creamcheese. The whole album, Freak Out, is him interacting with the little teenager, Susie Creamcheese, and how she's been freaking out, and Frank is trying t
o help her, like a teacher, like a guidance counselor. So McCoon, and so what does he call, what is the big slogan on Zappa's second album, kill ugly radio? That's what McCloughan was saying, the same thing. Turn off radio for a while, leave it alone. Let us have a non-electrified environment. McCloughan was saying, Zappa was saying the same thing. Interesting how one comes to the same conclusion. If you look at all the factors that Frank listed in that famous quote, he says, "'We use all visual
media, all perceptual deficiencies. "'We use God and other things that remain unnamed. "'And television,' he said." He listed a whole inventory, which is the same inventory that McLuhan's talking about. Yes, and for me, it's very clear that McLuhan and Tapa were both the new type of artists of the electric environment. And, well, actually, commenting on all the past funders also. All the media. McLuhan was the artist of the logos and the mythic, and Chapa was the artist of the acoustic. Like, i
n a way. Here's the quote. Now let's try to relate this to Thunders, but where is it? Here's the quote I was trying to remember. Zappa said, now remember, he's saying what he's doing is not an object and not a project. It is both a project slash object. So remember we were talking with Carolyn Gorton about the new art has to be object less. So Zappa does bring in the object word, but he cancels it with the word project or projection. So Mazapa says, his project object contains plans and non-plan
s, also precisely calculated event structures, think of McLuhan's talking about structures, designed to accommodate the mechanics of fate, that means the inevitable effects of media for a population that's not aware of the effect, not aware of the century shift. So these is, ZAP is going to respond and accommodate the mechanics of fate and all bonus statistical improbabilities attendant thereto. McLuhan in 6667 is saying we're going to see many bizarre forms manifest, be evoked here. That's what
Zappa's calling bonus statistical improbabilities and then he says our project incorporates any available visual medium. So like McLuhan, he's available for any platform to do his art or his commentary or his amateurism. McLuhan celebrates the amateur versus the professional. Zappa does the same thing while also maintaining professional expertise. So Zappa said we're going to incorporate any available visual medium, consciousness of all participants, including audience, so that means we're goin
g to have ESP, and we're going to deal with all perceptual deficiencies and we're going to deal with all perceptual deficiencies. We're going to deal with God as energy and other things. Now that's very comprehensive and the same comprehensiveness as McLuhan's inventory of media. McLuhan deals with perceptual deficiencies, perceptual ratios, so pretty uncanny the similarity in their agendas. And you know, Frank was not meeting McLuhan. He did not know of McLuhan at that time. We could also bring
Eric McLuhan and how he relates the synesthesia to the soul, because McLuhan said in the electric environment, this carnates man and brings us into this angelic state, and he says we were never as religious as we are now, and this, one of the effects of the electric environment is, like you you said this proliferation of new age cults and... Enthusiasms, Gnostic enthusiasms is what McLuhan would say or millennial ecstatics. Because it's a way of trying to balance this state of freaking out like
Alice in Wonderland. Yes. And Humpty Dumpty and Old Mother Hubbard. All the fairy tale children, fairy stories, grooms fairy tales and whoever the other guys are, are in the electronic environment. And Finney's Wake is riddled with them all because you are moving into a world of fantasy, of non-physical reality, or what Eric calls the metaphysical. Once you go into the electric age, Eric says, you can't have physical laws anymore. Now try to tell that to anybody from 1910 until now. Okay, you'r
e reading up on Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking and studying physics and the new laws they're talking about. Well, Mr. Frank Zappa and Mr. Marshall McLuhan say you can't have laws in the physical under electronic conditions. Nobody dealt with that point. It's a weird situation because Marshall McLuhan said, for example, the Newton empire ended in the 1900s when Max Planck created or discovered the quantum physics, then there is no more matter and we cannot explain actually what's really... w
hat are we made of or what are these particles and this and that, and until now we are still looking these little particles lost in that labyrinth. But at the same time, the Newtonian type of thinking, the linear, the logical, makes that many people cannot recognize the nonphysical. And that's the paradox that we are looking for the explanation of how Logos creates or how this reality is made. And not only the real real, but the cyber realities we're creating with our medias, the spaces they cre
ate, the art, the printing press, the electronic medias, they all create new spaces, new realities. And now we are more into this cyber space than in the real, real. At the same time, people cannot recognize the non-physical. It's a big problem because we're still under the sonabolism, the hypnosis of the printing press, but we are far from that. So. Right, that's a good point. When people go metaphysical, the old environment becomes the necessity, the anesthetic, the mother of invention. So peo
ple started to become rampant materialists in the 20th century, right when materialism was not applicable anymore. And so the people can't handle the non-material, the metaphysical electric effect, so they grab on the recent past and make it have huge significance, archetypal intensity. And so everybody is proud, we were talking about this with O.J. earlier, proud to say Bishop Usher was a jerk when he said we only live 6,000 years. Obviously Darwin and all the other material sciences have prove
n that we've been here millions of years and on and on and on. So that becomes the archetype of sophisticated education and actually is only following the ritual of the past becoming an archetype. That is the pattern that always happens with new technologies. So you had to understand McLuhan how the past, the science would become, the Darwinian science would become the archetype where people could rest their weary souls as they encounter the invisible and the non-visual. So McLuhan, one of his t
herapies was, I'm explaining to you people why you naturally go and turn the past into an archetype. That was a huge psychology. It's a mixture of sociology and psychology because he wasn't just analyzing individual people like Freud, he was analyzing whole trends in culture on the level of anthropology and sociology. He was coming up with a new pattern that people fell victim to. So, McLuhan explained why people would become more and more religious, but in a mixed up way. And so Gnosticism and
the New Age stuff is retrieving visual identity, visual space, literate identity, against the what appears to be an anonymity that threatens the Western identity. And then that was for most of the 20th century. Then all of a sudden the 21st century brought in technology that hoiked up private identity with your own Facebook page, your own MySpace. Now it was a virtual, multi-body private identity, but that leads to even more innumerable confusions. Yes, and McLuhan said culture is our business a
nd Zappa said we're here for the money, but what is the motivation of the new creators? Like John was saying, she wants to be famous. But most people, they just want some likes, as you say, and be part of the conversation and take turns on this new, yeah, dialogue. on this new, yeah, dialogue. That we have been engaging since the fall. Right, now you remember the, McCluney used to make fun of the term the horseless buggy. So when people bought a car 120 years ago, they thought they were getting
on a horse, a motorized horse. So they always saw the present in terms of the old. So they called it, the car, a horseless buggy. So the buggy that the horse drew in the 19th century now was mechanized without a horse, but they had to include the horse. It's just like if you're trying to become timeless you fight against time and you're being duped by the concepts of time in your effort to be timeless Nowadays, why do they call media social media? Media environments as McLuhan defined them our s
ociality language print Electric media our sociality. So, print, electric media are sociality. So why would they call the web world, the tactile internet world, social media? Why are they redundant? Got any theories on that? It's like saying social social, or media squared, or social squared. Now all that's on my chart in 95, and I don't think the term social media came in until about 10 years later, 2005. But again, it's a horseless buggy situation. It's a silly name. It's a way of naming the n
ew tribe, the discard nativeive tribe, I suppose, that... Well, it's a way of acknowledging Android Meme. If the Android Meme is coming alive and obsolescing the chemical body, the human communication, then that's a new medium. But the Android Meme tries to appear social, tries to make you feel that you can engage in the conversation. So it says, yes, we're media, but we're social media, because you might notice the fact that it's not social. It's a horseless buggy. I think Karen wants to say so
mething. Right. Do you think people thought media before social media? is more controlled by the, by corporations? Yes, it was one way. Right. It's the actual participatory two-way that you can talk back to the Android Meme that is the meaning of social media. Right. That's what it is. But they don't have the right terms for it, you know. They, they thought media was not talking to you. Actually, it was a machine that was interrupting your life and making you less social. They did not realize th
at the analog phase from 1850 to 1990 was a very social interaction. They thought the media was something out there, a monster. And now they're saying, wow, that monster actually likes us and is going to allow us to talk to it. So people don't know. So they don't know it's the horseless buggy. Horseless, they think, means no horse. They think media are not social. So they call it the breakthrough social media. So it's a rearview mirror name that actually counters understanding of what started of
f as social. With ESV. Yes, and before when you were talking about the digital prohibition, I was thinking how the artists were doing what the Android mean does now. They will comment on the effects of media and absorb all the thunders and comment on that like Joyce and McEwen and Zappa and you with your chart. It's a new type of art form. And until the Android Meme, that was also one of the roles of the artist, to make this metanoia, these exegesis of all the logos, all the altering, and transl
ate them in a work of art. But now the Android Meme is taking that role or took that role. Yes, exactly. McLuhan saw it in the analog phase. He said the environments, the media environments are altering people like the artists used to do. The artists would try to make a painting be a teaching machine. And then the radio, TV, and movie environments took over and they became the teaching machines. Now what's neat is that McLuhan did perceive the coming Android Meme. So the teaching machine in the
30s and 40s was not obvious to people, but you could write about it. Then in 1969, he makes this statement. A rapid series of innovations is an AirSats anti-environment. So an anti-environment is something that's awakening you. If it's not a real anti-environment, a fake anti-environment, it's AirSats. So what is the AirSats anti-environment? A rapid series of innovations. That's what the Android Meme brought to people. Endless innovation 24-7, either in program content or in new kinds of techno
logies. So McLuhan defines the Android Meme as a rapid series of innovations as an AirSsat environment. That's a pretty good definition of, say, pop culture saying, they live, or the machine came alive, or it turned into a monster. All the street level definitions or terms describe what McLuhan laid out technically. And when Zappa says that he's here to do any available visual medium, look at Zappa as speaking as the Android Meme. You remember, whenever he presents himself in a play, he's a robo
t. And the actual Frank Zappa, the creator, remains nameless. He did that in the book Them or Us. So the robotic processing of the Android Meme' endless turnover of fads and myths makes you, as a commentator, a robot. But to the degree you understand that, then you can claim some kind of artistic awareness. So, the Android Meme is a modern artist. It is a collective of surrealists, dataists, constructivists, pop artists, Duchampians, all the different art forms of the 20th century are what the A
ndroid Meme does. So that's my long explanation of what you just said, that the artist has been usurped by the Android Meme. I have this quote. Yeah. Let me just see if I can find it. This is a great quote by McLuhan from 1960, his early version of Understanding Media that he did for the National Educational Broadcasters. So, I know I posted it in alt.slack, so we'll put McLuhan, avant-garde art. All my postings are in there. Let's see if that comes up. It doesn't come up. Okay, so I've got to c
ome up with... Oh, oh no, here it is. OK, so I've got to come up with a, oh, oh no, here it is. Here's one quote, not the one I'm looking for, but it's a beginning. So McLuhan considered an artist engaged in a game. He used to call his Monday night seminars a game. And in the understanding media, he has a section on games. So you can substitute the word art and media and the Android meme for the word games here. So he says, games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing release o
f particular tensions. They are collective and popular art forms with strict conventions. Ancient and non-literate societies naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or of the outer cosmic drama. The Olympic Games were direct enactment... what? Oh sorry I thought you had finished the quote. No I just uh... I had a little interruption there. The Olympic Games were direct enactments of the agon or struggle of the sun god. The runners moved around a track adorned with the zo
diacal signs in imitation of the daily circuit of the sun chariot. With games and plays that were dramatic enactments of a cosmic struggle, the spectator role was plainly religious. The participation in these rituals kept the cosmos on the right track as well as providing a booster shot for the tribe. The tribe or the city was a dim replica of that cosmos as much as were the games, the dances, and the icons. How art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals is the story
of the detribalization which came with literacy. Art like games became a mimetic echo of and relief from the old magic of total involvement. As the audience for the magic games and plays became more individualistic, the role of art and ritual shifted from the cosmic to the humanly psychological, as in Greek drama. Even the ritual became more verbal and less mimetic or dance-like. Finally, the verbal narrative from Homer and Ovid became a romantic literary substitute for the corporate liturgy an
d group participation. Much of the scholarly effort of the past century, so that would be like 1850 to 1950, much of the scholarly effort of the past century, so that'd be like 1850 to 1950. Much of the scholarly effort of the past century in many fields has been devoted to a minute reconstruction of the conditions of primitive art and ritual, for it has been felt that this course offers the key to understanding the mind of primitive man. The key to this understanding, says McLuhan, however, is
also available in our new electric technology that is so swiftly and profoundly recreating the conditions and attitudes of primitive tribal man in ourselves. The wide appeal of the games of recent times, the popular sports of baseball and football and ice hockey, seen as outer models of inner psychological life, become understandable. As models, they are collective rather than private dramatizations of inner life. Like our vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal communication, a
nd they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. If we take a tennis racket in hand or thirteen playing cards, we consent to being part of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially contrived situation. Is this not the reason we enjoy those games most that mimic other situations in our work and social lives? Do not our favorite games provide a release from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine? In a word, does not Aristotle's idea of drama
as a memetic reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures and perfectly, no sorry, in a word, does not Aristotle's idea of drama as a memetic reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures apply perfectly to all kinds of games and dance and fun? For fun or games to be welcomed, they must convey an echo of workaday life. On the other hand, a man or society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton, or the zombie trance of the automation. I don't know which word h
e means. Art and games enable us to stand aside from the material pressures of routine and convention, observing and questioning. Games as popular art forms offer to all an immediate means of participation in the full life of a society, such as no single role or job can offer to any man. A job or role doesn't provide that anymore. The whole expansion of games and entertainment is necessary for awareness. Hence the contradiction in professional sport. Yes, professional in quotes. When the game's
door, when the game's door opening into the free life leads into a merely specialist job, everybody senses an incongruity. So he's talking about when people become professional athletes, there's something a little off. When the game's door opening into the free life leads, in other words, if you are enjoying your games in whatever community you're involved in, you know, weekly baseball league, but then you turn professional, you become a specialist. And people say there's something off about thi
s. So that's what he's saying. Hence the contradiction in professional sport. When the games door, which opens into the free life, leads into a merely specialist job, everybody senses an incongruity. The games of a people reveal a great deal about them. Games are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland, or some utopian vision by which we interpret and compete and complete the meaning of our daily lives. In games we devise means of non-specialized participation in the larger drama of our ti
me. But for civilized man, the idea of participation is strictly limited. Not for him, the depth of participation that erases the boundaries of individual awareness as in the Indian cult of Darshan, the missing experience of the physical presence of vast numbers of people. A Android Meme is a machine that can get into action only if the players consent to become puppets for a time. For individualist Western man, much of his adjustment to society has the character of a personal surrender to the c
ollective demands. Our Android Meme helps both to teach us this kind of adjustment and also to provide a release from it. The uncertainty of the outcomes of our Android Meme games makes a rational excuse for the mechanical rigor of the rules and procedures of the game. So I substitute Android Meme there, so I'll rereread it as it was written in Understanding Media, pages 237, 238, the MIT Press edition. A game is a machine that can get into action only if the players consent to becoming puppets
for a time. For individualist Western man, much of this, much of his adjustment to society has the character of a personal surrender to the collective demands. That's since the printing press. Our games help both to teach us this character of a personal surrender to the collective demands. That's since the printing press. Our games help both to teach us this kind of adjustment and also to provide a release from it. The uncertainty of the outcomes of our contest makes a rational excuse for the me
chanical rigor of the rules and procedures of the game. So, isn't that pretty neat? How's that for an in-depth explanation of the Android Meme? Via games and art, entertainment. Yes, yes, it's wonderful. And, um, McLuhan saw that even geology, I mean the electric environment is what he called a game people play. Because he said, um, when God becomes theory, God dies. And we cannot explain this thing, as he called this, what we would say, you know, physical. And yes, this other field that were co
mmented by Katoum and Zappa take us to this point of the post-digital... Prohibition. Post-digital. Exhaustion, How do you say? Implosion. No, I'm falling asleep. You're saying digital explosion? No, fatigue. Like... Participation. We are... Extortion? Extortion? Extension? No. Okay. Okay. We are extortion, extortion? Extension? No, okay. Okay, what's the concept you're trying to talk about? Yes, we're in this point of saturation, of fatigue. Fatigue, chronic fatigue? Yes, everybody is shatterin
g and all types of creations. Millennial ecstatic. We get together in Christmas to watch our cell phones together with them and post and post and post. And yes. That's social media. So people had cell phones and Web 1.0. Then Web 2.0 came along and it was nice and friendly and they could walk around with their iPhones and they could continue texting but could do it with other people. So yes, people get together in social life together they get together today to sit and engage their private chip
body in a group that and this whole study of medias, of the logos brought McLuhan to try to... Break down, to break down. Yes, and at the end, he could not explain the thingness. The thingness, right. The thingness of the thing fish. Yes, and the thing that I came somehow to solve and to explain after all these explorations. Okay, so this is the... Right, you mentioned art. I'm going to give McLuhan's statement in 1960. I found it. What's Bob's archive bob's archive is on outslack outslack dot c
om or whatever it is that's the fan site for the church subjects where i put all my quotes i got like fifteen thousand quotes on there so i did that to find it so here it is McLuhan wrote this in nineteen sixty it is quite literally true that since printing, okay, Cal, you want to mute? Okay. It is quite literally true that since printing, it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, of prints, of press, of telegraph, of photograph, movie
, radio, and television. In recent decades, the arrival of several new media had led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. So you're talking about 1910 to 1950. But at present, let's say 1940s, before World War II. So in recent decades, the arrival of several new media But at present, let's say 1940s before World War II. So in recent decades, the arrival of several new media had led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves.
Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artists to the groups in charge of the new technologies. So that's the advertising agencies and the intelligence agencies. That is to say that whereas in the past the individual artist manipulating private and inexpensive materials, you know, writing, pencil, pen, quill, painting materials, stone, so manipulating private and inexpensive materials, the artist was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public. So that's
the way it was. Whereas today, the artist works with an expensive, not inexpensive materials, works with expensive public technology. And the artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it, but the artist can no longer provide years of advanced awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development. So he's saying it was slower 100, 200, 300 years ago. So when new
technology slowly came in, the artist could predict the effects, the services and disservices of the new invisible technology. But it's been such rapid turnover in the 20th century that the artist cannot make predictions about what's going to happen to people. He doesn't have any time to do it because that technology that's causing a new stress of anticipation or prediction is obsolesced pretty quickly by the next technology. So I'm going to read that again. Experimentation is passed from the co
ntrol of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technology. That's the Tetrad managers. That is to say that whereas in the past, the individual artists manipulating private and inexpensive materials was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public. Today, the artist works with expensive public technology, but the artist and public merge in a single experience. There's no gap of spans of time or of timing for someone to say, this is what's coming. The new media
need the best artist intel. The Android Meme needs the best artist talent and can pay for it, but the artist can no longer provide years of advanced awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development. So what, who is an artist, anybody is an artist today. You get on the Today Show, you're Justin Bieber, you make a video when you're 12 years old. You get on the Today Show, all the teenagers decide that you did this on your
own mister bieber you weren't uh... corporately sponsored to work and i like you so he becomes an anti environment uh... for the teenagers a for a few months until he blows it and then he said a few words that counters his image in any these ostracized and uh... uh... we were on the uh... on the uh... the maui cruise last night uh where you go out and look at whales. And this, so Mardi Dredd is singing all the songs, everybody's dancing, and this little eight year, eh, she was about nine years
old, demanded that Marty Dredd, who was mainly a reggae guy, but he can do all the regular hits of pop music for the last 50 years, she demands him to do a Justin Bieber song. Now, here's a nine-year-old, Justin Bieber, he was was big ten eight years ago and then uh... blue it and i don't know what's that is a debate may basically made fun of but this little girls going through the technological evolution and she's just arriving at two thousand and nine and she wants bieber that's her guy and sh
e wants is uh... margie do it did you ever do it carol yeah we he did a couple he to already do it. Did he ever do it, Carol? I don't know. Yeah, he did a couple. He wouldn't do it right away. He did a couple of other songs first. But there was a couple of songs I didn't recognize. That might have been a Justin Bieber song, but I didn't know that it was. But I saw the little kid screaming for their art environment. You get what I'm saying, Roxy? Yeah. And it's rear view mirror for anybody who's
aware of what's going on in pop music in 2015, but this little girl, she had kept up, she had arrived at the Justin Bieber phase of Bob's chart, the Dobbs quadrant. So that was just an interesting thing i was observing now McLuhan said in nineteen seventy three he updated his statement about the media and the artists he says the new art form of our time is the media themselves now he says that back in nineteen sixty at present the artists have yielded to the media themselves but now McLuhan is s
aying the media themselves are art forms. That means they're obsolete. When something becomes an art form, it's not part of the present. The new art form of our time is the media themselves. Not painting, not movies, not drama, but the media themselves have become the new art forms. Then he says, I write cartoons. I've wanted to write a play for a long time on the media. And the media themselves are the avant-garde areas of our society. Avant-garde in the art world no longer exists in painting a
nd music and poetry. It's in the media themselves. Then he says, it's not in the programs, not in the media content. Avant-garde is not in hockey, not in baseball, or any of these entertainments. Pop critics like Richard Meltzer, they started celebrating wrestling and that in the 70s because they were sick of what happened in the music industry. He didn't think it was worth reviewing. He did, and he started doing that right around 1973. Maybe he was reading McLuhan and he missed this sense becau
se Richard Meltzer goes for the media content and McLuhan is aware that you can make that mistake. The avant-garde is not in hockey, not in, they didn't teach you this in school, in art school did they Roxy, that you know hockey was the avant-garde. Avant-garde is not in hockey, not in baseball or in any of these entertainments. It's in the media themselves. So if it's not the separate media, but in the media themselves, that means the process of a rapid series of innovations that is an airsats
and environment. So that's the background of his statements leading up to that definition of the Android Meme. So that is an environment. Dermot? Go ahead. To point out, everybody's in show business 24 hours. Well, it's not even in show business. Let's update that. Show business is what everybody was, I mean Rod Stewart and these guys did songs in the 70s and 80s saying everybody's a star, everybody's in show biz. Show biz is not where we're at anymore. There is no show biz. There's no communica
tion. There's no audience. There's no creator. That's the big void that frightens people. And then iON comes in. So maybe we can get a word out. I mean, I'm using that word as a joke. Because even before in the electric environment, Francesco said the most important person in show business is the drug dealer in his place. Right, the drug dealer. I know he's here, Carol. We're bringing him in. Bert is making blurry showbiz entry. Bert comes and sits at the couch, at the talk show coach to promote
his latest movie and non-artistic experiment in an attempt to communicate to nobody and what are you here to celebrate? What are you here to promote, Bert? I've been listening for like the last hour, 15 minutes. It's been a fascinating discussion. I was blown away earlier when you were talking about how McLuhan and Joppa could sense what was going on in this current state in the electric environment and how they both reacted in opposite ways. The same way. The same way. The same and opposite. T
he same and opposite. Same and opposite. Interplane. Yeah, tactile. Tactile. They take one side or the other but could switch to the other side they were both and how and that was so clear it's so clear and also the one thing that was really uh... fascinating you said that uh... they sense that he couldn't have physical walls in the electric environment and i made the point to try to uh... express that to someone now or back in 1910 to current they wouldn't be able to understand that because the
y are hypnotized. That's fascinating. Then also what hit home for me is a professional athlete is a specialist and you see that every from whatever professional sport that they're all developed to be specialists in a lost world. Yeah, in a lost world. Yes. Very good. What is it you were saying there? You were updating the concept of show business. Right, right. So, you were talking about just before the athlete, the tactile. Yes. It's below in the electric environment. So, my chart is a picture
of the Android Meme. And the Android Meme presented a rapid series of innovations. Poliopathic, shrinking radio, shrinking computer, shrinking TV, shrinking satellite. The figures of that, the anthropomorphic projections were Zappa, McLuhan, LaRouche. All the people named on my chart are agents of the Android Meme. They are an expression of the rapid series of innovations. See, this is the hidden part. Yes. In a way, your chart is, like you say, you're the curator of the thunders. Yes. curator o
f the thunders, what was important for each thunder, for each technology. And I have that categorized as God, sex, politics, consciousness, and Orpheic Baroque spirals. There's five major mimic categories. Now both Zappa and McLuhan were accused of being robotic. And they themselves would say that they knew they were an extension of something, that they were being set up themselves. So the modern avant-garde, really avant-garde artists who understood the AndroMeme would know the silliness of the
position you are in, even though you're famous for offering awareness. See? Remember in Demoras, Zappa is describing himself as a robot, a ridiculous robot. That's what the journalists say about him. You have to appear robotic if you're going to be a really good artist artist you know in the last fifty years you have to be uh... so cold and detached and not involved in any of the local departments of academia or specialisms not a member of McLuhan and zappa weren't members even though they were
engaged all of them and were invited to be part of all of them but always to maintain their autonomy therefore looking like robots. They both were accused of that. Even Walter Bower said to me, I bet you when McLuhan died that they did an autopsy on him and they found that there was a whole mechanical apparatus in his fucking skull. So I knew Walter had not gotten it yet, because he was subject to the robotic taboo. You know, he didn't know that McLuhan had to be a robot. That's why Zappa repla
ys a lot of his themes, his music. He replays them in different media just like McLuhan, as Roxy pointed out, writes the same book and each sub-book is part of the one book just like Zappa's music is part of the one album. They actually are lazy. They don't make, they don't spend too much time making up new stuff. They just grab something since they were so prolific a long time ago. They just look into their archive, bring it out and comment on whatever the fad or myth is of the day. It's a mech
anical process what they do. Yes, that's how the do line, that's why the, uh, we, we... I think... ...going over the do line... They were both a word, really, of... Wait a minute, let's see what Bert, what are you saying? Let's see what Bert's saying. What, what are you saying about the do line, Bert? That was like with McLuhan, every time that we read a due line, it was like a repeat for the uh... It was the same fucking thing! Yeah! He was so lazy, he was not doing what he said he was doing. O
h, we'll keep you up to date and everything. We'll be aware of the new changes. And he just fucking used the same formula every issue. So what were you going to say, Roxy? Yes, the really deep meaning of the slogan, the medium is the message. It's really not about the content, but it's the medium. And the medium that they're using. When McLuhan wants to write a play. And this is I am too. Yes. The nonphysical is both medium and message. It's really amazing how we we go through all this all this
to talk with the nonphysical. The nonphysical is the explanation of all these genesis, all these thunders. Yeah, all the extensions. Thunders as extensions. Now, it was interesting explaining some of the aspects of iON to our guests. You know, we are entertaining our foster daughter and her children. So these are my foster grandkids. And after a few nights with me, they declared to their parents that Bob, and they include Carol, but Bob was the figure, and they said, Bob is the most amazing huma
n being we'll ever meet. They were not saying I ever met. They said, we'll ever meet. And now it was just telling them a few of the ionic facts of what it is, dealing with iON. They had their minds so blown that they occasionally had to take breaks. They had to go off to the corner and vomit or throw up or something. But, it was interesting watching... Now it's not a life a lifetime but the whole eternity. Right, right, right, right. So why did I bring this up? There was something, I was essenti
ally watching how their percepts, their perceptual apparatus, they couldn't, they couldn't, it was impossible, they never heard the idea that heaven came forth and is now talking to us. Like no one until I say it, you never heard that idea. That not, these aren't entities talking, this is the environment of heaven that you die into. The environment itself came forth to talk. That's what you, by Roxy saying, we are talking to non-physicals. It's an environment. What a preposterous notion. But whe
n you read the moon and Zappa, yeah go ahead. This is the wonderful thing that even the non-physical learn how to speak to create. Yeah they had to. The cloud. Yes, the cloud had to adapt. Nobody gets out of here dead, is the old phrase. Nobody gets out of here alive, but that's not right. Nobody gets out of here dead. Even the Android Meme had to adjust to the new situation. I mean, iON had to adjust to the new situation, and they had to become what they weren't. They had to probe. So let me se
e, what else? Yeah, go ahead. They had to probe. So let me see, what else? Yeah, go ahead. The healing anti-environment. Shh. The what? The healing? We arrived at the healing anti-environment or the balancing act that... Yeah, better use the word balancing act. We're not allowed to use the balancing act. Yeah, better use the word balancing act. And we're not allowed to use the word healing. I will not show up if we talk about healing. But back to this thing about. I'm being ironic. Yes, good. Wh
at were we just saying? So Bert was amazed at the similarity, the interplay. Oh yeah, so I'm stressing now that to be a serious artist, you have to recognize you begin with failure. McLuhan had a chapter in Understanding Media. The first three or seven chapters are broad themes. And one of them is the challenge and collapse, the nemesis of creativity. So he's saying you can be creative as you want, but there's too many factors that you won't be able to avoid collapse. And then Zappa writes in hi
s autobiography how much of a failure he was and that, I don't know if he said failure is no problem, but he did say that he suffered the nemesis of creativity, challenge and collapse. So that's a good level of honesty there. So you have to include the fact that you're not going to be successful as an artist, as a scientist, unless you work with nonphysical, because nonphysical will deal with the big part of the world you can't handle or you can't see. The only way you can survive the nemesis of
creativity is working with the creative swimming pool itself? Yes, and it's very interesting how the Android means trying to become human. And IAM comes and explains humans are actually gods. So the Android means actually trying to be god. And then the non-physical is trying to be God also, to be what we do, to create the logos. So the Android Meme is trying to make you God, but dependent on it, so you get it by default. I encounter saying, well, yes, we can make you a god even better than what
the endorhamine can do. But we can do it if you start with the premises. You already are, and there's nothing much that you have to do. The endorhamine is making an effort. You see it in advertising everywhere. They're telling people, look forward to this awareness that you're going to arrive at if you buy our product. They don't say, you don't need to buy our product. It already got sold, already sold out, already used and ran its course. You know, that's what I am saying. We've already ran ou
r course, we already did what we were going to do before we showed up. That doesn't encourage any sales. Mclellan said that the New Pharisees and Scribes are the scientists. The non-physical comes and tells us all these things that shakes all the constructions we have, all the theories we have to explain the Book of Nature and the Book of Revelation. And this is the 12th standard that we're engaging in. Right, now you just said the scientist is an agent of the Antichrist. That's exactly what McL
uhan, Zappa does. His plays are always about a renegade rogue scientist who has a new form of hypnosis. A new form of techno gadget. That's the same theme as McLuhan. McLuhan is exposing the prince of the air as an electric engineer. Yes, he's exposing the thunders as, um, like the crazy scientist that wants to conquer the world and destroy humanity and make us monsters or robots. Right, dupes. Now, um, now what you just, okay, so you got the, and so you have Zappa and them exposing the scientis
ts all the time acting like surface clowns. You look at the cover, you can look at the Newsweek article of McLuhan in 1966, a big spread on this great genius they're saying, and he's got pictures there. He allowed these to be posted of him making balloon faces, childish faces. I mean, your father or anybody's parent, when they got in the media, they did not make fucking clown faces. McLuhan was so detached, they didn't care, they looked stupid. And Zappa does the same thing with the ridiculous p
ictures of him. There's a great detachment of being a buffoon in the middle of it all. And that's what McLuhan called the emperor cum clown. You have to be emperor and clown to contend with the tetradic flips that are going to be done to you if the Android Meme starts hooking you up. They both had a great sense of humor and they used it to their benefit. A great sense of humor. I mean that's the thing. Well how about this? They didn't have a great sense of humor Bert. They understood how the And
or meme was going to frame you. That's part of the channel. You are going to be nailed at some point in some way. And so it happened to Frank real quickly. They had a guy photograph him on the toilet and that became a poster all over the world. how would you like to have yourself sitting on a crapper and that's a poster everywhere you go yes and and and they used to make fun of him what? it's amazing how in a way also McLuhan and Tappan say the solution is the apocalypse and Nyle comes and says,
yes. We have to erase this recording. You have to erase all these thunders. And start using the environment. Let's try and relate the thunders there. So McLuhan defined thunders as technological environments. And iON has different meanings of thunders. Some of it we're not allowed to talk about. You have to buy the recordings, and then hopefully it's discussed in one of the rewrites or something. But the thunders are really special in the Bible. But in general, you could say they are the techno
logical effects. All right? So that's a lie from me, but maybe not so much of a lie. I don't know how much of a lie it is. But you're not wrong to include the Joyce-McLuhan definition of thunder as the same as the Bible's use of it. Okay? You're not too far off. Okay, so how do we bring in the thunders in Zappa? Where is Zappa got thunder happening? Well, he's aware of all the different technologies affecting the environment, and he recognizes them even as art forms. Right. I'm trying to figure
out... From the radio, the TV, the movies, the comics, the magazines, the advertisement. Right. Could it be his work with the Sinclairs? Sinclair, yes. he definitely has thunderous. He says he likes to move air molecules around huge stadiums He loves it create huge effects and sound in the new arenas Now reading a history of rock and a lot of the bands in the early 70s went into what was called arena rock and then punk rebelled against that. The next generation didn't like these big, you know, E
merson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, whatever other guys did this big rock stuff, rock arena. The next generation of that to be given impersonal we're gonna bring back the ramones and garage bands of the mid-sixties and go back to a little short singles so um... to zap it was could be lumped in as a guy duped into doing arena rock but again he tried to show that he was very conscious process and was trying to sculpt the arena rock environment. So he said, I get great pleasure out of moving huge volum
es of air molecules around in the big environments, the big arenas. So that is working with thunder. That's Orpheus tuning the world. I mean, the amplified music, which he helped invent some of these amplifiers. That's thunderous activity. So like Zappa acted it out. He didn't explain it completely as technically as McLuhan did. Zappa acted out what McLuhan was, Zappa was the example of what McLoone was saying the modern artist, scientist, doctor would be. Well, they were not only creating but v
ery interested on the effects of their altering, as you say, creating. Right. Yeah, Zappa always said... Yeah, is that what Albie said? Yeah, affecting the air molecules and the chemistry. He was saying, yeah, he knew that, he would say there were invisible frequencies going on, and Uncle Meek was exploiting them, Uncle Meek being the metaphor for the triggerman, that'd be McLuhan's term for Henry Kissinger and the Tetrad managers, and the intelligence agencies and the advertisers. So he said, w
e've got these inaudible frequencies happening, Kissinger and the Tetrad managers and the intelligence agencies and the advertisers. So he said, we've got these inaudible frequencies happening. We must make them audible. We must hear them to see what's going on. And so he always said, I'm just making these new songs and new orchestras and new performances to find out what they sound like. So he's not like a Beethoven who knows what it's going to sound like I guess and then writes it up to sound
like what he wants the sound to be. Frank admits that we don't know what this group dynamic, this synergy of the whole rock experience and other media he used, we don't know what the total output of it is. We have to do it. So that's probing the thunder. Yes, and in a way, they're commenting and exploring defects, like wondering, what is this? We are senders and receivers, and we're everywhere and nowhere at the same time with the electric environment for no reason at all. So, McLuhan in a way h
ad this need to become a Catholic to explain the things that he could not explain. And Zappa was also into trying to understand the cosmic theory. But this beyond was not possible until Ayam himself or themselves came and explained what is really happening and what are things really, how things are really made and what was the... What were the thunders about? Yeah. So the artist often cops out and says, well, I'm an artist, I paint because I can't explain it, or I write because I can't explain i
t. They always say, my art speaks for what I'm trying to point out. If I could point it out, then there wouldn't be any art. I wouldn't be any art. I wouldn't make any art. So they came really close, Zappa and McLuhan are describing iON, but they couldn't do iON, they couldn't be it. And then iON comes forth to do it, but they became very close and couldn't spell it out. Though McLuhan seemed to be more accurate because Zappa rejected the Bible, but McLuhan knew the Bible had something in it. An
d therefore he was trying to figure out what it was, and he was right about that. The Bible had something that humans didn't know about. Yes, and both were aware that each thunder changes the pace, the rhythm. Right. You know what he called it? Maybe his term for thunder was harmonic climate. He used to use that term a lot, the harmonic climate. That was McCoy? No, that was Zappa. You said Zappa, yeah. Yeah, he would talk about creating harmonic climates or taking the harmonic climate that was a
nd creating an environment, sculpting it, changing it. You see it in that Stairway to Heaven, the way he has the synch clavier kind of burp every now and then, humorously make a weird sound in the middle of this great music or you know, great classic rock song. You've noticed that, Roxy, right? You'll make the synclavier do these cosmic burps and things. It's pretty good. Let's see... The synclavier was farting all the time too. Right, right. Harmonic. Now here's what you do. You go to Code Mass
Replica, which Zappa produced, and you read the song lyrics or the song titles. It's really symptomatic of what he and B Fart were about and what they were talking about. So one of the song titles is Old Fart at Play. Another one is Ant, Man, Bee. A-N-T-M-A-N-B-E-E. There's a history of media. Ant, Man, and Bee. Man's in the interval. The ant makes hardware. The bee makes software. And there's a whole bunch of other neat titles that that Beefheart is saying that to me seem to be Zappa's theolog
y that he didn't say he let Don say it you know what I mean the other part the other unsaid part in Zappa's world yeah Yes, and he always spoke about electric light and he was somehow fascinated with the fact that the light is the only medium that has no content. That's not McCloughan. And Zappa was always holding up, Zappa had pictures of himself holding up a telephone without it plugged in, a light bulb, holding up electric gadgets. And he once did an ad, a commercial for Pacific Gas Electric,
I think that's the California hydro environment, you know, the big setup there. And in the ad, he advocated media ecology. He says people should turn off their electric use every now and then. He actually took a media ecological line in his public service announcement on behalf of the gas electric company, Pacific Gas and Electric. So he even sounded like McLuhan there. And that just happened out of the blue. Jerry Fialka heard it and played it for me. He recorded it around 1990, 1991. All of a
sudden, the government asked Zappa to do it. Yes, but how can you turn off your other buddies? That's not possible anymore. That's right. He was saying that right in 1990 when it was no longer possible and Frank was obsolescent, was going to be kicked out, killed, murdered pretty soon, and that's when Bob's album came out to pick up the task, I became the next rapid series of innovations to provide an airsats environment until iON showed up. But it was airsats until iON, then it became bonafide
. But another point, I think in his essay for Life Magazine in 1968, one of the sections is called the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Like in his article article he's pointing out the electrical structure we gotta check that but that may be why they invited him to do it because he mentioned them in an article back in 1968 unfortunately i think gail has most of those articles are deleted. Anything that Zappa wrote, interviews are okay because they are the magazine's property, but anything that
Frank particularly wrote, I'm going to have to get the actual artifact. I want to read the story line to Uncle Meat that came with the albums. I want to read that Life magazine article. Let's just see if that does come up. Maybe...well it was a Life magazine article. It can't be...oh here's iON. What's iON saying? Well, iON sent me an email. So quarter to six, two hours ago. He says, or they say, Mighty Fine Shoe, S-H-O-E, dot, dot, dot, really big, dot, dot, dot, really big shoe, S-H-O-E. Now
a shoe is, is Stinkfoot. That's a song by Zappa called Stinkfoot. And then he says, may they, here's iON, sick of us talking about these guys, but he's right in tune with my chart. I obsolesce them all. He goes, may they rest in, so it's this really great show. He does the obligatory polite compliment, and then he goes manipulative, and he says, may they rest in peace until we get there. Capital government, go. Yes. Yes. We're just moving the air molecules until we come back. We're just statical
ly. Oh, listen. So he's demanded a song. Portal, still alive. That's that game show thing, right? And so I don't know what's going on. He says, this is excellent. And excellent is spelled in cap letters, E-X-E-C-L-E-N-T, execlent. He was so worked up about getting it played, he spelled the word wrong, execlent. And there's George, what is George's last name, Carol? Up in Toronto? Greg's friend, George, the ever cynic of Iandum, sort of. George was Planto, Lanto, Lapperday. Oh, Carol doesn't hear
me, she's watching TV. Hard to get her involved in this. She was listening up to a few minutes ago. George, um, what's George's name up in Toronto? George Lepardo. George Reno. Reno, that's it. Hey, can I have a bite? I'm eating in Deborah Morris' ear. She complains about me eating my breakfast, dinner, and lunch during whatever we are, payday. Well, the show lasts 18 hours, and don't know how many, you have to... Yes, I do not eat a good chunk of the hours, I do not eat. So, 13 minutes after i
ON sent in their messages, George Reno, on behalf of the Evergreens, sent in his latest mental doodle. He calls them George's mental doodles. So, they always show up Saturday night. I used to immediately respond and tell them to listen to us, but I gave up. He never did anything about it. I don't even know if he saw my responses. So, we were talking about the Thunders. What was the, oh yeah, Life Magazine. Let's see if we can find a Life Magazine article in 1968. Okay, Zappa, you have to find go
od Zappa articles. So I'm looking, go ahead. In a way both McCloughan and Zappa were trying to rebalance the perception because each media was focusing on one sense and in a way they were trying to bring all the senses back together and work together. They still do it but in a more balanced way. And yeah, because the next environment is the tactile synesthetic environment. Okay, that is true. McLuhan was trying to recover the eye, retrieving Western fundamentalism of the visual space, bring it b
ack comprehensively, use it without being a dupe of it. And Zappa was always saying, we're here to make you rational again. It's the same agenda, to retrieve Western archetypes. But you don't do it by knee-jerk being a neoconservative just trying to impose visual space on people ramming up their asses without awareness of the service and disservices. Frank and McLuhan and Joyce were aware of the service and disservices while pointing out the value of that tradition. Frank called it excellence. H
e went on about excellence. People didn't experience excellence anymore. And you know, the more you become a... Ex-ce-lence, like iON Brodick. Yes, ex-ce-lence. Good point, yeah, ex-ecl-ence, ex-ecl-ence. Now that's really... Ex-e-c-lence. No, that's the way, because you don't want to be an old-fashioned academic saying, oh, we need excellence. So you misspell it. That's right. That's exactly the answer. You say, we're all for execlents. You say it wrong. Okay. So what were we just talking about
? Excellence, something. Do you want to read something? Yes, the Life Magazine article. So there it is. It's listed and it isn't the content of the, you know, it's not working there. Let's see. Maybe under articles. 68. The Oracle has it also. Wow, we have it. We have the article. We have the gold. And I'll just start reading. We'll see. What did you say? Ex-Linton. Ex-Linton. Ex-Linton. And I'll just start reading. We'll see. What did you say? Excellent. Execellent. Now, it's. I did other work.
You did what? Excellent. Whatever. You know how. Yeah, whatever. A Mexican breakdown. We're failing to match here. What are you saying? Now here's what, Ayan making fun of Andrew Kristol is excellent. He made fun of the New Zealand accent. Excellent, the way Ayan would say it. excellent he made fun of the new zealand accent excellent way i would say it and you know somebody sent me a picture of a maniacal guy laughing and said mister crystal was he talking with andrew crystal i don't know we'll
have to look into that guy later in eric's book in the history of menippean satire he talks about the role of digression in Minnipian satire. And just scanning down through the article, there's a section, Zappa, titles, all those great rhythms, colon, digression two. So that means there might have been a digression one. Yes, the big note, digression one. He's actually naming and using the word digression Which is a major theme of an epic satire? Then he has digression three So he's saying that
I could write this article in in three paragraphs, but I'm going to provide digressions and fill up many pages so in light of McLuhan who everybody called called the Electric Oracle, the Oracle of the Electric Age was the title. Now, here's what's, here's, now, I don't know if I've ever spelled this out before. McLuhan does, they do a big spread on him in Life Magazine in 1966, and it's called the Oracle, the Oracle of the Electric Age. So two years later, Zappa does a big article for Life Magaz
ine and what's he call it? The Oracle has it all psyched out. I was the only person in the world that summer who looked at it and said, Jesus Frank's talking about McLuhan. Because I'm the only one who fucking remembered that there was an article two years before on McLuhan calling him the Oracle. Right? So I'm thinking, is Frank talking about McLuhan when he says the Oracle right so I'm thinking it's Frank talking about McLuhan when he says the Oracle that's all psyched out he had known that Mc
Luhan was called the Oracle two years late two years before no he didn't but the words do it 40 years later it was this 47 years later we are proving it yes 47 years later we are pointing out that he was referring to McLuhan and didn't know it but the words were. I mean, you have this twinning of themselves going on for a couple of years, for a year or so before this article and we're spelling it out, nobody knew this, now we're making it visible and then you can go back and find that Zappa gets
one big article in Life Magazine when he's at the peak of his media acceptability and he gets to use the word that was referred to McLuhan. I mean, so beautiful, right? Yes. Yes. Oh, he's predicting iON. iON is the oracular. Everything works. Yeah, everything works. That's too general. Let's try to make it particular. This is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, v
ery, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, ver
y, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very iON. iON is the oracular. Everything was. Yeah, everything was. That's too general. Let's try to make it particular. This thing was predicted. iON. The oracle has it all psyched up. From the genesis back to the tree of life, as iON says, everything has been
since everything has been this, it's founders appearing to retrieve the power. So it's really the conceptual continuity. Yes. In big detail. Now here's what Frank might have, in his own personal perception, chemical body perception, who do you think he was referring to? He was referring to me. Because I'm there telling him stuff back then that he's finding useful and he's smart enough to appreciate, but he's probably like those young, my grandkids, who the fuck is this guy? How does he know all
this stuff? You know what I mean? He probably was a prep. So he made a joking remark, Bob has it all psyched out is what the title means because he would have heard semi-McLuhan things from me, semi this, semi that and he would have noticed it. Okay so let's read it. So this is June 28th. I just want to interrupt very shortly because I have said for example you were mentioned by Joyce and Nostradamus and... And the Bible. And Moses, everybody. Yes, it's like that. McClung is trying to understand
the logos because he wants to, he always claims he wants to understand the technological environment and its effects, but he was actually trying to understand the connection of the logos to the thingness and how we create. And yes, I think in the words, these things show because this is the link to the nonphysical. For me, it's very logical. Right. Now, what time do you have to go? It's 7 o'clock your time. You've got two hours or three hours left? 8.40. You only got a half hour left? No, you h
ave an hour and a half left, right? An hour and a half left. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Good. Okay, good. So, now what's interesting about this article is Frank lays it out like an inventory, an inventory of effects it's semi journalistic, but he's really got it organized and he's reviewing the history of Pop music rock and roll you know from the 50s to so maybe 14 years of music So it's June 28. That's 2 times 14. It's 1968 16 814 so two times fourteen. It's 1968, 168 is 14. So, in the history of
rock, rock and roll, they usually sort of begin in 54, which is right after that dramatic year, 1953, when many things changed. And you can read in my diaries, Bert would recommend, would remember how we, my father and I, discussed the changes of 1953. Stalin died, many things happened in that year. So, one of the effects of it was the surfacing of Bill Haley in the comments in 1954. So Life Magazine, June 28, 1968. So the title is, the first title, first section is called The New Rock. Now I'm
going to mute you. You're moving papers around, right? Roxy? Right? No, I'm muted. Okay, good. All right, so then, Bert, you were muted for a second there, right? You got dropped. No, that's not you. No, I'm not muted. Okay, so you guys are available, all right. So here we go. The first text is called The New Rock. Rock music, oh my God, look at this, the first sentence. Now I haven't read this maybe in 40 years. I might have read it once in the 70s after reading it in 68, so it's gonna be all
new to me. Look at this. Rock music is a necessary element of contemporary society. That's a fucking doctor talking. There's your healing. You're right, there's your healing. You know what I mean? He's not, what would John Lennon have said? He would not have said that. He begins. But Papa, Papa claimed that many, that he was healing. Household Pneumonia. Yeah, he was therapeutic. So he goes, rock music is a necessary element of contemporary society. It is functional. It is healthy and valid arti
stically. It is also educational. In the background, in the brackets, how to ask a girl for a date, what love is like, close bracket. It has all the answers to what your mother and father won't tell you. So Rock is the Oracle. He's saying the Android Meme is the Oracle. The Oracle has it all psyched out. That's what he's saying. It's a teaching machine. This is like high school version of McLuhan. You know what I mean? He's talking to high school people and explaining exactly how McLuhan, he's t
alking technically like McLuhan. You know what I mean? He's talking to high school people and explaining exactly how McLuhan, he's talking technically like McLuhan. It has all the answers to what your mother and father won't tell you. It is also a big business. This is a brief history of rock and its relationship to our society. What's fucking more McLuhan-esque than that? I mean, McLuhan does it differently, a little more sophisticated and academic. But this is the same point. He's going to exp
lain the medium of rock. It's incredible. Rock music is a necessary element of contemporary society. It is functional. It is... Now wait a minute. You guys are claiming you're fucking muted. What's that noise? I'm gonna do something All right, let me mute. Let me know I want your reaction, so it's sort of hard just try not to move things So that it's very loud For a minute are you shifting your papers around your notes your lecture notes? No, you're a PhD Are you shifting your papers around, you
r notes, your lecture notes? No. Your PhD? I did it, but... Okay, here we go. No, but as McLuhan said, the electric environment is creating this effect of people retrieving religion and the media. Right. And... So Frank is... Papa says the religion you have to follow because it's the only one that delivers the Buddhist music is frequency. Right. That's right. Similar to what I and then says too. No, that's a good point. The oracle is a religious term and he's calling rock religious. That's a goo
d point. And you're going to see, I remember, he's going to go into that, but I'd forgotten he started off this way. Rock music is a necessary element of contemporary society. It is functional. It is healthy and valid artistically. And this is when people are hating rock. They think it's dangerous hippies and everything else. They ban rock and roll. I mean, it's causing all kinds of problems for 14 years. Rock and roll and then rock. It is healthy and valid artistically. Who the hell, anybody in
the art environment other than Andy Warhol would agree with that? I don't think so. It is also educational. How to ask a girl for a date, what love is like. It has all the answers to what your mother and father won't tell you. It is also a big business. This is a brief history of rock and its relationship to our society. So he's going to do a figure ground analysis. Then he starts off low like you know gesturing the wand. Isn't that what you go when you make the wand gesture when you're a wizar
d? Low. Okay so he goes low. Then he has fifth fifth p f f p f f so it starts off with a sound effect low and then and he says a nifty questionnaire to get you interested so you'll read the rest of the article so he actually wants you to read the whole article i mean this is a serious uh... course he's offering he goes part one the fifties so here's where he's going to do in inventory of media of the 50s. Who remembers beer? White poured in lemon juice. For 10 points, what was the name of the gu
y in your school who used to buy your juice for parties? Two, who remembers making out and getting hot? For 10 points, how old were you when it happened? Three, who remembers duck tails, peggers, leather jackets, bunny shoes, brogans, tight sweaters, teardrops, full skirts with a million starchy petticoats, Sir Guy shirts and khakis? For ten points, how much did you pay for your St. Christopher medallion? Four, now this is the 50s he's doing, who remembers gang fights, tire chains, boys with raz
or blades in the toes of their wedgies, girls with razor blades in their hair, blood and sickening crunch? For ten points tell why the cops were afraid of your gang. How come you guys aren't laughing? Did you mute yourselves? Yes. Yes. Keep your. If you're quiet... Yeah, unmute yourself if you're going to be... If you can be quiet so we can hear your spontaneous responses. So anyways, that's pretty good. And he's saying, who remembers? I think he's implying nobody would remember it unless prompt
ed. Or maybe they would remember it because there is no past in electric age. It's always being recycled anyways in news stories. So he lists all those things. And he goes, part two, the 60s. Okay, now here's what's funny. He's gonna list things that are happening right now as if they're obsolete already, all right? Who remembers speed, smoke, acid, transcendental meditation? That was all happening in 1968. And he's already pronouncing it, gone. For 10 points, name your connection or guru. There
's the drug dealer is the hidden ground of music or your guru. So that's pretty clever. He says in the Bob Marshall interview that things happen so fast that your most recent five or ten minutes might become nostalgia for you. I don't know if you remember that in the Bob Marshall interview. He talks about the world will end in nostalgia because you'll become nostalgia for something that happened three hours before and you'll just grind to a standstill. So he's implying things are becoming past p
retty quickly and that's McLuhan-esque. Who remembers getting stoned and having an orgy? For ten points, how old were you when you learned you were incapable of relating to others in a tender, personal way and finally discovered you were becoming asexual? So there's an inventory of discarnate effects. Who remembers electric hair, bell bottoms, plastic jackets, sandals, high boots, bulky knit sweaters, Gucci's, mini skirts, Devo shirts and velvet pants. For ten points, look around the house, find
your beads and bells and recite Hare Krishna without laughing. Now this, he's in people's faces. What is big in 68, he's asking you to consider the past. Now that's pretty McLuhan-esque. It's Bonanza. You said you guys are celebrating all these fads you guys are into right now, or is it Bonanza, replays? He's telling them everybody's doing that they're unworthy of Salud. Right. It never happened. All these things you thought you were doing two weeks ago are not part of your present. Okay, so th
en he says, who remembers demonstrations, truncheons, mace, police dogs, the Pentagon, Century City, Century City is in L.A., blood and sickening crunch. He had that on the 50s. Blood and sickening crunch. That was back in was back in fifty so it's still there uh... for ten points tell why you were afraid to cut your hair infiltrate the establishment and do it the easy way that's what he did he starts criticizing these kids in nineteen sixty nine then a year later he's over in london talking at
the london school economics of the young radicals the marxist uh... sds kind of things and he's saying what you need to do is cut your hair London talking at the London School of Economics with the young radicals, the Marxist SDS kind of things. And he's saying, what you need to do is cut your hair and infiltrate the military. That's what he's telling kids to do if you're serious. So he's saying it right here. Why were you afraid to cut your hair, infiltrate the establishment, and do it the easy
way? I don't know what he means by easy way. Cut your hair, is that the easy way? Well, maybe it is the easy way if you infiltrate. The hard way is to make a big issue out of it, and then the Android Meme makes a fad out of it, and then makes money out of your rebellion. Maybe that's what he means. That's the hard way. So he says, our present... So he did eight questions, four for the 50s and four for the 60s. Our present state of social sexual enlightenment our present state of social sexual e
nlightenment is to a certain extent attributable to the evolution of rock and vice versa. So sexual evolution is due to rock, there's a figure ground thing. And rock evolved because of the sexual enlightenment. So it's intertwined, tactile, right? Our story begins back in the good old days. It is the recreation centers. No Levi's or Capri's, please. And he has brackets, school functions, unquote. Not brackets, in quotes. School functions and teen hops were real swell and keen and acceptable to m
om and dada. He pronounced them dad, D-A-D-A, dada. Now he says that in his autobiography that he never heard of dada until it was pointed out to him that he was doing dada and he accepted it once the definition was laid to him. But when did they tell him this? In 67, 65, 66, pretty early? If that's not a misprint, he's saying Dada right there even though he's not supposed to know about Dada. I guess somebody pointed out the first day he performed. He said, they were also dull. The school functi
on and teen ops were acceptable. They were also dull unless the school function at Teen Hops were acceptable. They were also dull unless you liked to dance a foxtrot. I don't know why I'm mispronouncing words. They were also dull unless you liked to dance a foxtrot as the high school swing band fumbled through an evening of combo orcs and reprocess Glenn Miller. So in 1954, 55, and 60, still had the high school parties around jazz and swing. The kids would be holding on to each other desperately
and sweating. The chaperone would come along and say, quote, seven inches apart, please, and hold a sawed-off ruler between you and the. They had to act and dance seven inches apart. He says society was very repressed sexually and dancing was a desperate attempt to get a little physical contact with the opposite sex. Free love, groupies, the plaster casters of Chicago, they used to make plaster models of rock stars penises. The plaster casters of Chicago and such bizarre variants as the GTOs of
Laurel Canyon in LA didn't exist then. Preoccupation with sexual matters accounted for a disproportionate amount of daily conscious thought process and diverted a lot of energy from schoolwork. So here's Frank the teacher saying, if we just let these kids fuck more, they'll do better in their fucking schoolwork. Trying to be rational. So he's, I put him and McLuhan in the sex quadrant on the chart. McLuhan analyzed the sexual changes and transformations, but he did it a little more technically.
Zappa is an advocate. You know, he's taking a point of view. He's saying, this is where he's not a pure media cologist, to say that people were repressed in the 50s sexually. No, they had different sensory ratios. Different from the sensory ratios in the 60s. I mean look at the Chinese, there's this documentary out now. They didn't have sex for twenty years in Mao's people cultural revolution. They're talking to these young Chinese girls and their parents and grandparents didn't know what sex w
as pretty well. That's a Chinese sensory ratio. Doesn't mean they're puritans or repressed, it means they're different kind of sensory requirements. So anyways, it's like McLuhan said, sex to a tribal person is like a cup of coffee. Preoccupation, we did that. This, the sexual, because the kids were too obsessed with sex, he claims. Now they didn't become obsessed with sex really, consciously, until the 60s. But they were becoming asexual because they were becoming discarnate. The TV landscape w
as making their sexual energies distorted so they wouldn't mind where they had sex because they were concentrating on their image in the TV landscape. This is before the TV body. So he goes, this sexual problem, this and the low quality of teaching in many kids. What? He left out a word. So there may be mistakes in this. This and the low quality of teaching cause many kids to seek education in the streets. Youth gangs with marvelous names and frightening reputation cruise the streets at night, s
earching for ways to compensate for the lack of sexually approachable girls. Vandalism and assorted manglings became acceptable substitutes for teen sex. Young men would compete like cowboy gunfighters to be the baddest cat. Baddest cat, in quotes. This dubious honor would generally entitle its bearer to boss the gang gang and in some instances preferential treatment from those few daring girls who would quote go all the way unquote. So Zappa may be consciously hooking up the sex meme to bug the
bourgeoisie that are reading this magazine. He might not even believe in this. McLuhan also said violence was an effect of the electric environment. Because we were losing our identity and it makes us violent. Whereas Frank is saying it's a chemical body and its frustrations cause violence. Yes, but McLuhan said that we're just trying to, we're seeking for roles because of this loss of identity. And yeah, one of the roles is the gangster. Right. So the, so see Zappa is describing the symptoms y
ou make an inventory of the symptoms he's not looking at the figure ground causes he's doing as an American he's doing efficient causality he's not doing formal causality but in the long run when you see what he wrote that he wasn't conscious of but his words were he is doing formal causality, but he wouldn't know those terms. So he says, parents, unfortunately, have a tendency to misunderstand. Did he cut out? I thought I was the one dropping. Okay. Carol knocked me out. I'm back on. Yeah, I'm
back on. So what was being... Did you guys know we got knocked off? I get knocked off? Yes. Very sure. How did you know? You just clicked on... You started to say it's... What was it? It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... It's a... What was being, did you guys know we got knocked off? I get knocked off? Yes. Very soon. How did you know? You just clicked out. You started to say a word and then you clicked
out. Right. And could you hear me talking to Carolyn? Because her phone was still on. No. OK. Because she dropped her phone and it somehow affected my phone. OK. Now what's interesting, here's Zappa, who looks like a maniac in the pop culture in 1968. He just attended the Grammys and grossed out a lot of people at the Grammys earlier that year. And so here he is talking down to the parents. He's explaining like Dr. Spock or Ruth, the sex therapist woman, Ruth. He's being a Henry Kissinger, talki
ng, explaining society to the adults, and the adults would consider him a, you know, a disgusting, dirty hippie or something. It's, see the irony here? He is, he's explaining parents to the parents. And they, and most of them wouldn't even know who he was. They'd be reading this and they wouldn't know who Zappa was. But for those that did know him, encountered him, unfortunately, from their point of view, they would find this quite arrogant. Parents unfortunately have a tendency to misunderstand
, misinterpret, and worst of all, ridicule patterns of behavior which seem foreign to them. When they noticed a growing interest among teenagers in matters pertaining to the pleasure-giving functions of the body, they felt threatened. Mom and dad were sexually uninformed and inhibited. In brackets, a lot of things wrong with society today are directly attributable to the fact that the people who make the laws are sexually maladjusted. End of brackets. Mom and dad were sexually uninformed and inh
ibited, and they saw no reason why their kids should be raised differently. End brackets. Why should all these dirty teenagers have all the fun? End of bracket. Sex is for making babies, and it makes your body grow misshapen and ugly afterward. And let's not talk about it shall we? So he does this mundane therapist sociologist detached expert, Tetrad manager talking to the Americans. Then he goes the big note, digression one. Okay so. Which is satirical. I mean he's telling these kids about, the
Okay, so... Which is satirical. I mean, he's telling his kids about, the parents were talking about, now he's going to fucking talk about something else. A digression. Why would, why does he need to do a digression? It's because we are talking about something, we talk about the non-physical. He does the same. He's talking about the non-physical. Yes, good point. The big substance, the big substance. Right. Non-physical yeah good point non-physical is physical when we're saying non-physical it's
a more subtle version of the physical so it is physical so he goes the big note digression one in the abnucleus emuca electric symphony orchestra album so that's the name of the album that he hires to make Lumpy Gravy with some of the wrecking crew in it, the famous wrecking crew. So he calls it the Abnukles Emuka Electric Symphony Orchestra. It sounds like a vomit, a barf sound. The Abnukles Emuka Electric Symphony Orchestra album, Lumpy Gravy. So in that album, there is a section on side two.
So he's turning this into an ad for his own work. This is what McLuhan would do. He's turning the article into an advertisement for his own important works. In this album, there is a section on side two where several unidentified characters discuss the origins of the universe. One of the characters explains the concept of the Big Note. This is like iON. You go right for the big topics. You go right to the, you people are fucked. You better go back to source energy. You better get happy or get o
ut. Frank has gone to the big level. This is part of menippean satire. He starts bringing up the origins of the universe. One of the characters explains... One of the characters explains the concept of the big note, colon. Everything in the universe is composed basically of vibrations, hyphen. Light is a vibration, sound is a vibration, atoms are composed of vibrations, hyphen. And all these vibrations just might be harmonics of some incomprehensible fundamental cosmic tone. That's iON, right? T
he non-physical, the mystery landscape. The harmonics, now that's environmental, harmonic climate. Harmonics of some incomprehensible, the thunders of some incomprehensible fundamental cosmic tone. Then he says, how important is sound? I participated in a conversation recently, now this is what McLuhan would do, he'd say, I had a fucking conversation he had with somebody on the street. You know, like, okay, here's the important evidence. I was talking to Billy the other day. I participated in a
conversation recently with Herbie Cohen, in brackets, our manager, about rumors of a government research project. The project, it seems, has been going on for several years. What does sound do to plants? Now this is the soundtrack the story in Uncle Meat. He's already talking about it. And Uncle Meat has just come out about this time. No, no, no it doesn't come in 69. Lumpy Gravy and Where Owns Your Money sort of come out in the summer of 68 approximately. But he's not talking about the Uncle Me
at scenario which will come out in early 69. But he is saying it here. What does sound do to plants? According to Herbie, a field of corn increased its yield. The individual ears even got bigger. Because the research team set up loudspeakers in the field and pumped in some music. According to Herbie, the next step is to find out what kind of music the vegetables like the best. And Zappa says, the ways in which sound affects the human organism are myriad and subtle. Now he's talking about this re
search on the effects of sound on people and plants in the history of rock. So he's starting, if you're smart, he's going to explain that rock is a government operation. Right? Or something like that could come up here. The ways in which sound affects the human organism are myriad and subtle. Why does the sound of Eric Clapton's guitar give one girl a sensation which he describes as bone conduction? That's in quotes, bone conduction. Would she still experience bone conduction if Eric, using the
same extremely loud, thick tone, played nothing but Hawaiian music? Little nod to Bob there. Which is more important, the timbre, in brackets, color texture of a sound, the succession of intervals which make up the melody, the harmonic support, in brackets, chords, which tells your ear what the melody means, in brackets, is it major or minor or neutral or what, the volume at which the sound is heard, the volume at which the sound is produced, the distance from source to ear, the density of the s
ound, the number of sounds per section, the number of sounds per second or fraction thereof, dot dot dot, and so on. So there's a long question analyzing all these aspects of sound as an environment. Just like McClue would ask this kind of stuff. Which of these would be the most important element in an audio experience which gave you a pleasurable sensation? An erotic sensation. Look at the kids in school tapping their feet, beating with their fingers. Now that would be tactility. People try unc
onsciously to get in tune with their environment. In a variety of ways, even the most unconcerned, that's in quotes, even the most unconcerned people make attempts to tune up with their God. So there he's bringing in the religious part. Tune up in quotes. Hal Zeiger in brackets, maybe it's Hal Zeiger in brackets, one of the first big promoters of rock entertainment during the 50s, close brackets, says, quote, I knew that there was a big thing here that was basic, that was big, that had to get bi
gger. I realized that this music got through to the youngsters because the big beat matched the great rhythm of the human body. I understood that. I knew it. And I knew there was nothing that anyone could do to know that out of them. And I knew there was nothing that anyone could do to know that out of them. Not sure what that means. You mean maybe to get rid of it? I don't know. And I further knew that they would carry this with them the rest of their lives. So here's the government scientist s
aying this music is going to program people incredibly. So Zappa is tied to programming the environment, specializing in sound. Right? That's McLuhan. Yes. McLuhan also. McLuhan also said that rock music... It's not really a digression. He's dealing with the topic, but it would appear to be a digression. So what were you saying? No, McLuhan considered rock was going to undo literacy. I remember hearing it in one of his speeches that he said rock music was going to bring back the oral tradition s
o frank is sort of giving birth to it. He said it already did. He said it already did kill education, literate education. So then what did you say? I drowned out your last sentence. And then that's sort of what I'm getting from reading what you're reading Frank's. Frank is lay it out as well he's got with the huge changes between the fifties in the sixties because the sound has changed the technology has changed if someone wanted to be mcclellanite but not just blatantly quoting McLuhan but want
ed to make a sort of difference in case people were bored of hearing McLuhan he's doing the perfect representationuhan without mentioning McLuhan. Without mentioning the word media. I mean he's totally a disciple of McLuhan here. In his motives too. So that's the big note to aggression one. Then it says, Rock Around the Clock, which is the famous movie, came out in 55, Blackboard Jungle, and Rock Around the Clock was Bill Haley's song, came out in 54, that was like the first, one of the first ro
ck and roll songs. There's a debate about what is the actual first, but it makes a short list. So this section is called Rock Around the Clock, the title of Bill Haley's song. So Zappa says, now he's going to go personal here, he's going to give personal experience. In my days of flaming youth, I was extremely suspect of any rock music played by white people. The sincerity and emotional intensity of their performances when they sang about boyfriends and girlfriends and breaking up etc. It was no
where when I compared it to my high school Negro R&B heroes like Johnny Otis, Howling Wolf and Willie Mae Thornton. So he'd been made tactile, gritty and tactile by listening to rhythm and blues and the white almost jazz like smooth surfaces of white rock music, you know, just wasn't tactile enough for him. So he says, but then I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed, okay, so he's going to another medium. When the titles flashed up there on the screen, Bill Haley and
his comments started blurching. Quote, one, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock, unquote. It was the loudest sound kids had ever heard. There's the thunder. Good point, Roxy. There's your thunder. It was the loudest sound kids had ever heard at that time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teenage rooms across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and chief record players listening to the, quote, dirty music, unquote, of their lifestyle. In brackets, the parent sa
ys, go in your room if you want to listen to that crap and turn the volume all the way down, unquote. So nobody could hear the radio rock and roll really loud, he's saying. For most of them, they're in their little teenage rooms, huddling around old radios and cheap record players. But in the theater, watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn't tell you to turn it down. I didn't care if Bill Haley was white or sincere. He was playing the Teenage National Anthem, that's capitalized, Teenage Nationa
l Anthem, and it was so loud, I was jumping up and down. Now there's the moving the sound modules around. He's actually being conceptually consistent here. He goes on for like 30 years, you know, 25 years making it louder and louder in many different ways, not just volume loud. Making it more and more invisible and digital. So he says, Blackboard Jungle, not even considering the storyline, in brackets, which had the old people winning in the end, end of bracket, not even considering the storylin
e, represented a strange sort of endorsement of the teenage cause, endorsement in quotes. In quotes, they have made a movie about us, therefore we exist. But see, that's McLuhan's point. You translate one medium into another medium, it has drastic effects. So for kids, at least in the content, seeing themselves in another medium, that was unbelievable. But of course there were other more technical sensory effects going on that McLuhan would outline. So Zappa is doing the efficient causality, loo
king at the content, referencing a bit of the form, but it's the efficient part of the form, the efficient causality, the loudness. So are you guys there? Yes. Yep. Let's see. Roxy, you get knocked off? Yes. Yes. Let's see. Roxy, you get knocked off. Yes, you got knocked off, Roxy, right? So, you have any comment? Yes, I wanted to comment. Since you were talking about the big note, how in the way he's doing his version of the Genesis. Right. Your version of the Genesis. That at the beginning was
the frequency. Yeah. At the sub-asset, the frequency. Yeah. So, I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you
can see it. In a way he's doing his version of the Genesis. Right. That at the beginning was the frequency. Yeah. That Zappa says at the beginning is the big note. Right. What does he say? He said, um, yes. He's talking about a lumpy gravy as one of the characters discussing the origins of the universe. That's on there, we can play that, that's part of lumpy gravy, that came out, you know. Made in early 67, comes out in 68 and they're talking in the piano. So he's got, you know, a motorhead or
somebody doing this, put on how it started. you know, Mowdyhead or somebody doing this put on how it started. So, yeah, there's your knowledge. Yes, and he recognizes the big note as the first thunder. Right, and it agrees with iON that the frequencies and sounds are beneath the atoms. They're prior to the atoms. Yes. They're prior to the atoms. Yes, but in the NSS recording, you say at the beginning, beginning, something like that, like George? Yeah, beginning. Beginning. Yeah, that's a quote f
rom Phoenix Wake, the beginning. And I understand that with all these things that are shaking are all the foundations of what we think we knew like well there was no beginning and human creatures were always there and the words were also always there. Yeah, there was no bug inning, bug inning. But Joyce is saying he knows there's no beginning. Yeah, Joyce knows there's no beginning, so he misspells it, the bug inning. The bug, for little people, the little bugs, they think there's a beginning. S
o what is it, I think therefore I exist. What did Descartes say? I think therefore I exist? Therefore I am. I think therefore I am. Oh therefore I am. So Zappa is taking a collective medium. It's a they. They have made a movie about us, therefore we exist. That's good media. And he understands that if you're not in the media,, therefore we exist. That's good media. He understands that if you're not in the media, you don't exist. He said that in the 80s, but he understands this in the 60s in very
simple rudimentary ways. He says, because, well, he laid out the effect of Blackboard Jungle, and he goes, responding like dogs, some of the kids began to go for the throat. They did, oh my God, we've been reckoning, now we can kill everybody over 20 years old. Open rebellion, he says. So responding like dogs, that would be the Pavlovian conditioning, some of the kids began to go for the throat. Open rebellion. The early public dances and shows which featured rock were frowned upon by the respe
ctable parents of the community. They did everything they could to shield their impressionable young ones from the ravages of this vulgar new craze." Hal Zeiger in brackets is quoted. Quote, they did everything they could to make sure their children were not moved erotically by Negroes, unquote, end of bracket. From the very beginning, the real reason Mr. and Mrs. Clean White America objected to this music was the fact that it was performed by black people. There was always the danger that one n
ight, maybe in the middle of the summer, in a little pink party dress, Jamie or Susie might be overwhelmed by the lewd, pulsating jungle rhythms and do something to make their parents ashamed. Parents, in trying to protect their offspring from whatever danger they imagine to be lurking within the secret compartments, holy shit, of this new musical vehicle. Remember in his play in Time magazine, October of 69, he says that the concentration camp is run by a little mechanical colonel sanders doll
in the globe compartment of volkswagen bus and he has a but then again he is thinking this this is this is the year before he says that so i'm forgetting it's not the fifties he's saying what he had scripted out uh... in uh... fall of sixty seven when he said on the liner notes to were only for the money which doesn't come out for six months later he says this is due to unpleasant premonitions that's why he has he updates can be threatened and uh... meets the grunt people and they all become rob
ots that's what he we've discovered in sixty seven and he's a he's putting these little conceptual continuous things i mean you know he's saying in 69, they're going to find out when they see this movie that the concentration camp was run by the little doll in the glove compartment of the Volkswagen. He's got it right here. The parents thought in trying to protect their offspring from whatever danger they imagined to be lurking within the secret compartments of this new musical vehicle, in brack
ets, rock music, actually helped to shove them in front of it, whereupon they were immediately run over. So he's saying that, as usual, you know, you get publicity by bringing up the negative or the evil. So in trying to protect their offspring, they killed them. Now, this is pretty detached on Frank's part. I mean, he is telling the parents, he's trying to help them in some way. He's a double agent. He's working for the parents, for rational society, against the chaos of Jefferson Airplane and
the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. He's trying to tell them, hey, you actually helped to shove them in front of it, this new musical vehicle, whereupon they were immediately run over. The attitude of parents helped to create a climate, there's the hidden ground, an environment, a thunder. The attitude of parents helped to create a climate where the usage of rock music, in brackets as a pacifier or perhaps anesthetic experience, became very necessary. Boy, now this is getting complex like McLuhan.
They created a climate wherein the rock music had to be used as an anesthetic. Parents offered nothing to their children that could match the appeal of rock. It was obvious to the kids that anyone who did not like or attempt to understand, that's in brackets, or attempt to understand rock music had a warped sense of values. To deny rock music was to deny sexuality. Any parent who tried to keep his child from listening to or participating in this musical ritual was, in the eyes of the child, tryi
ng to castrate him. And he would include other sensory dynamics, not just the sexual. But that's his title in Freeco, Ritual Dance of a Young Pumpkin or something? No, Ritual Dance of the Child Killer. I think it becomes Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin in the Absolutely Free album. Part of the reason I might be stumbling over words, I need a damn drink but but I'm not going to interrupt this, we'll have to go forward, I will suffer. So, in trying to protect her offspring... Since, well, the fi
rst World War, then the Second World War, and then the Vietnam War, America has always been in war and Matthew went to war as another effect of the electric environment. It goes so fast that it's like a response of the speed of innovation. the body politic. The body politic has a massive identity crisis. And there has to be a war because this is like the result of all these innovations in technology. And in a way, many parents were against this music, but they were promoting somehow the values t
hat made their children enlist and go to war or that was seen as something... Great. Massive identity crisis. Massive identity crisis in all generations. The parents have an identity crisis, they're creating violence and the kids are having identity crisis and creating violence, being violent or but they thought it was positive and Zappa says later radio is new life so this is a new life form a monster that's come into their midst right a King Kong for example how come for example, Zappa didn't
have to go to Vietnam? You know why? Good question. How did he avoid to be... Good question. It's a good question but the answer is obvious. No, you don't remember. He had a... He was in jail. He got arrested. He got set up in a porno bust and that saved his ass. Wow. Back then, life did him a favor. He had to be there during the Vietnam, the latter half of the, second half of the 60s, be out there bugging everybody as a new extension. And he could only have done that by not being eligible for t
he draft. And that painful bust, while he was in jail for a horrible ten days, saved his, made him be B. Frank, you know, within a year or so. the draft and that painful bust, while he was in jail for a horrible ten days, saved his, made him be B Frank, you know, within a year or so. That's how he got away with it. He had a record. And they, back then, they were so fucking furious. What? Did his father have any influence on that? Maybe getting him set up for that? That's a good point. I don't th
ink so. His father was outraged by the whole thing and supported his son, knew his son was framed and was against it. uh... And it helped Frank in some way. I don't know if people, people didn't, they weren't in the war yet. The war, this was March 65, the war doesn't really get going until 66, 67 I think in the public mind. There were skirmishes happening in 65. There'd been advisors, military advisors over there since like 59 or 60. That was after the French had tried to do something, but they
gave up. But so this is before the whole dynamic of the war becoming a big social headache, Frank was luckily busted. Bob was working. Maybe I set it up. I was very busy back then. I was framing people all over the place. I might have done it. I can't remember. Maybe I did. Yeah, we were very busy. I couldn't keep track of it all. There was a period there in 65-66 where I wasn't in touch with Frank. He, uh, I visited the Kookamonga studio, uh, twice, but I was not going there in 65. I wasn't ar
ound him when he got busted, so I probably blocked that. I did probably, I usually blocked the bad stuff I did. So yeah, it's a good case to be made that I set him up. I did that. Or my buddies did it. Somebody was helping me. Thank you. Somebody was wanting me to get things done, so they had to set Frank up so Frank could help me. Now that could have been ionic, but it's pretty interesting to read this so many years later and see the conceptual continuity he's got here. So he says, there was mu
ch resistance on the part of the music industry itself. Now I know all this because I'm just reading, in the past two weeks I've been reading Dina Weinstein. She's the widow of Michael Weinstein who just passed a few months ago. And Weinstein is the main thinker with Kroker that made the book, The Data Trash. So I was interested in what she had to say as a sociologist. So she's going through all the details of the history of rock. And so it's fresh in my mind that these things. And she throws in
some things that we don't know about. For example, that payola was legal back then. But me and my buddies wanted to bust Elvis so we declared payola illegal and nailed him and Alan Freed. So I apologize for that but I'm sure it had a good boomerang side effect that led to everything else that we are thankful for, right? Yes. So... This is Christmas. Is this Thanksgiving? Are we thankful on Christmas? I can't remember. When do we get thankful? Anyways, there was much resistance on the part of th
e... There was much... We just got the gift. What about the gift? There is no more gift to be thanked for. The gift were already given, so... Yes, we already got the Christmas gift to a young nation. There was much resistance on the part of the music industry itself. Hal Zeiger quote says, I remember a conversation with somebody, the initials, a very famous songwriter who has written many of our all-time favorites wherein he chided me for being involved with this kind of music and entertainment.
And I said to him, and he names the initial, you are just upset because it has been discovered And he names the initial. You are just upset because it has been discovered and revealed that a song written by some young colored child in a slum area can capture the fancy of the American public more effectively than a song written by you, who lives in a Beverly Hills mansion. So, he's, uh, the war is on, the identity crisis. You are just upset because it has been discovered and revealed that a song
written by some young colored child in a slum area, Memorandum of Conduct says young kids can change consciousness, can capture the fancy of the American public more effectively than a song written by you who lives in the Beverly Hills mansion. So here's Frank, all he's doing is quoting a conversation from Herbie. Frank's living in a little world. He's just making music, he doesn't go out and socialize, he doesn't have a job world he's he's just making music he doesn't go socialize and have a j
ob he's not out there so he can only talk finder both society uh... by talking to his manager herbie colin or a guy who was in the industry hell's i care and and i was probably listed on free co that the team is ready to quote is immediate neighborhood for this big like a good uh... so uh... quoting his immediate neighborhood for this big light thing. So, where are we at? Yeah, so then Frank says, every year you could hear people saying, quote, I know it's only a phase, it'll poop out pretty soo
n, the big bands will come back, unquote. Year after year the death of rock was predicted. Dot, dot, dot, or pause. A few times as I recall it was even officially announced, officially in italics. Quote, rock and roll is dead, calypso is all the rage. So here's Frank saying this stuff is an environment, his opening statement is, in light of all that, it's necessary, it's a necessary element of contemporary society, it's functional, it's healthy and valid and educational. It's an oracle. So he's
talking about it as an environment that can't be stopped by puny opinions. That's McLuhanodore Dorno. That's not Horkheimer. That's not Herbert Marcuse. That's not Freud. All the guys that Ben Watson quotes have no fucking relevance here. As Kevin Currier, who wrote the book on Zappa called The Dangerous Kitchen, he said, Bob, do the McLuhan thing. Stop Ben Watson's nonsense. And we're doing it more than I even anticipated, right here. Right? Right? Who's our yes man tonight?... you burke are yo
u are yes you're but that we make your case that the order of the very good day for a very good there we have our yes men here when we need backup but the the point is is that it's so fucking blatant what frank is saying McLuhan is to clear that he's talking technically he's not reading on about how great rock music is not bringing his personal opinion he's talking about the effects in society they can inventory there he's what doing the mcclean suspect yet you do in the mcclean to be net all ri
ght the McLuhan? Yeah. He's doing the McLuhan thing. Yeah. All right. No, do not do the sound check environment. What do you call it? The speakeasy, the speakerphone. I can't make all these things. You got to come in. If you're going to say something, say what it is. You have to do it. Every syllable. I have to say... Right, you have to change. I understand that. But what were you just saying there? He's doing the McLuhan explorations, the type of exploration, the type of analysis McLuhan does.
Right. And McLuhan would relate it to developments in art history and go through that. Let's see if Zappa brings in the same kind of information that he did in the early days of the Zappa. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I
think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do that. I in art history and go through that. Let's see if Zappa brings in musical history. You know what I mean? Is he going to bring in to compare eras, different regions? So then that was called, that was Rock Around the Clock, which was part of the big note, digression one. Now he says, all those great rhythms, colon,
digression two. So is it the great rhythms of the jazz era or of pop and rock and R&B? So all those great rhythms, digression two. So then he starts explaining again, technically, the function of the drums in a rock music ensemble is to keep the beat, in brackets quote, it has a good beat, I give it ten points Dick. He's talking about American Bandstand, Dick Clark, they would measure the song by the beat and give it points. So some teenager on Dick Clark's American Bandstand would be saying, i
t has a good beat. I give it 10 points. This is actually quoted by Dina Weinstein in her history of American rock. On early R&B records, the drum part was usually expected... Jesus! On early R&B records, the drum part was usually executed with brushes. All the arrangements required, generally, was a dull thud on the second and fourth pulse of the bar. There were very few breaks or fills, breaks and fills in quotes. When the drum fill, in brackets, a short percussion outburst, usually at a cadenc
e or resting point of a musical phrase, end of bracket, became popular in rock arrangements, it most often took the form of groups of triplets, in brackets, three-note rhythmic figures squeezed into the space of two beats, dot, dot, dot, sounding like ya-da-da, ya-da-da, ya-da-da, ya-da-da, womp. I don't know if that's how you say it, ya-da-da, ya-da-da, ya-da-da, ya-da-da, womp, end of bracket. For a while, during the mid-50s, it seemed like every record produced had one or more fills of this n
ature in it. Eventually, with the improvements in studios and recording techniques, the drummers began to use sticks on the sessions, and the cadence fills became more elaborate. But before and after the fill, the drummer's job was still to keep the beat, dot, dot, dot, that same old crappy beat, old crappy beat dot dot dot the beat that made the kids Hop around and scream and yell and buy records Look at that Efficient market scream and yell and buy records a long process of rhythmic evolution
has taken place Since the early there it is then I predict that that he'd do the phases of art history, in this case music history, with technical talk. Describing the aspects. I mean, here's Frank Forever, the fucking music teacher. A long process of rhythmic evolution. This is like Bach trying to explain electricity to his buddies over there in Vienna or someplace. Right, Roxy? Yeah. to his buddies over there in Vienna or someplace. Right, Roxy? Yeah. He probably wrote for a local newspaper ex
plaining the electric interval. This is very different from the pretty press. A long process of rhythmic evolution has taken place since the early 50s. It is laughable now to think of that dull thud on the second and fourth as lewd and pulsating. So he's pointing at the century shifts made by the technologies. Now he has a section called green visors. Isn't that what clerks had gambling joints for? Those little green things on a hat they put over your eyes or something? Green visors? What do you
think? Bert, what's a visor? Yes, yes, yes, the visor. It was the old symbol of the guy in the casino or... Right, or the... ...the Delta cards. The bureaucrat, you know, the Delta cards or... ...took the bets or some technical... Maybe Frank is being the green visor guy, you know, he's explaining things, I don't know. So it's titled Green Visor. So he begins again with the only guy he knows, Hal Zeiger. He keeps quoting Hal Zeiger. It's like McQuown quoting Harold Innes. Zeiger says, the probl
em at the time was basically this, trying to make the music acceptable or to try to get the right to expose it, and that took some doing. I knew the kids were listening to the radio stations. Now this is a guy who's going to do the first rock show, rock and roll shows along with Alan Freed probably. I knew the kids were listening to the radio stations. It was just a matter of how to merchandise this to get their dollars too. I told Bill Graham and he means the founder of the Fillmore and former
manager of Jefferson Airplane. So Bill Graham was a household name in 1968. I told Bill Graham, quote, you've got to understand when these things are underground, that's one thing. But the minute it goes over ground, the minute you see it looks like money, everyone wants in, unquote. So then Frank says, so to make R&R, rock and roll, acceptable, the big shots of the record industry hired a bunch of little men with cigars and green visors. Okay, so this is what it is. So he's talking about the wr
ecking crew, the studio musicians, because they're hired to synthesize and imitate the work of the Negroes. So he says, so to make R&R acceptable, the big shots, R&R, isn't that a military term? When you take a break, right? We're going to get some R&R. So he brings in the metaphor, the military aspect. So to make R&R acceptable, the big shots of the record industry hired a bunch of little men with cigars and green visors to synthesize and imitate the work of the Negroes. The visor men cranked o
ut phony white rock. Highly skilled couriers then delivered the goods to American bandstands along with lots of presents. tokens of their esteem though he's talking about payola, bribery, along with lots of presents to Dick Clark for all his marvelous assistance in the crusade to jam these products down the kid's throats so here's Frank, at first they were trying to stop it now they can't stop it so they're going to translate it back into visual space by making cash out of it yes, dot dot dot, P
at Boone was notable too for his humanistic activities, in brackets, bleaching little Richard and making him safe for teenage consumption. So we're gonna read this again. The visor men cranked out phony white rock. Highly skilled couriers then delivered the goods to American bandstand along with lots of presents, tokens of their esteem, to Dick Clark for all his marvelous assistance in the crusade to jam these products down the kids' throats. Now Dick Clark is still prominent. American Bandstand
is still happening in 68. I wonder if he thought about suing Zappa. Dot, dot, dot. Pat Boone was notable too for his humanistic activities, activities in brackets bleaching little richard and making him safer teenage consumption do you know who pat boone is uh... roxy ever heard of him no he was a pretty boy in the late fifties who who would cover all the black hits the hits the black records that were hits in the uh... in the uh... black radio stations then you had chuck berry little richard s
tarted to cross over and the white kids um would hear little richard but they would buy and then immediately pat boom would take a little richard song and do his version of it a nice cleaned up silly version and then then he would sell more to the white kids than little richard would this went on for several years they blatantly ripped off the black records but just did you know that first? no i did not know that uh... i'm learning that the black pockets is going to be pissed off when they hear
this show tonight there's going to be, al sharp is going to come in she'll be but i don't know that i mean i heard that about with elvis presley but i didn't know that about pat boom that that's what's i mean there was always the joke about elvis presley but i didn't know pat boom that's interesting frank's uh... breakdown of that that's right well it did you know whystein talks about this in her book. It's interesting. I read this book in Time for this History. She lists off like five songs. Li
ttle Richard, May, Chuck Berry. They did these different songs. They sold a little bit because they crossed over. They were the first white consumption rock and roll along with Bill Haley. But then immediately Pat Boone would make the same fucking song with a cleaned up surface silliness and he would sell three times what Little Richard made. Wow. And you know it's interesting warfare, it's a race warfare. Pat Boone goes on to become a very conservative supporter of Ronald Reagan. It's like he c
ame out of Orange County, I'm not sure sure but that world and they made sure they got their guy in there and they didn't care why did they give some of the money to little Richard you know they just didn't care apparently as far as I know but so that's pretty blatant ripoff eh? And remember the blacks were considered inferior, they weren't even allowed to be part of society so it was no problem stealing from these animals, right? These are just animals, we can take their stuff and make it bette
r, we're gonna make it better, it should be cleaner, we need more brushes, less drumstick. But this is actually going to cause the civil rights. Now, Dina Weinstein, as a sociologist, points out that actually the hidden environmental effect was that the white kids started to get the black music eventually. The covers, they faded out after a few years or something because the kids got more access to the black music. And then they started being black, and so there's no more racism on the kid level
, at least on a general level. There still were assholes, like the guys who beat up Frank for having blacks in his band in 1957, right? But the world was going to be made one big mash pot, mosh pit. Okay, one of my, so then Zappa says, one of my favorite Negro, and this is in 1968, black power just becomes a term in the media about 68, 69. Definitely the African-Americans not in, so it was normal, you see it in McLuhan's writings, you called them Negroes. Do you guys ever call yourself negro whe
n i was younger and then you dropped it? well it was it was just the whole uh... we call it systematic uh... indoctrination when i was younger because uh... i grew up in the sixties i was young in the sixties but, but I remember that from because my grandparents from Earlier in the 60s used to be referred as color and then in 60s was heard as Negro and then later in the 70s became black So went from colored Negro black All right, but you know there one day......in fact, one day... In those......
they didn't tell you. What, Roxy, what did you say? In other languages, the word negro is still used, for example, in Spanish. Oh, yes? There was this change that happened in America, didn't occur in other languages, in French, in German, in Spanish. It's still called negro today. Yes. Yes. All right, so, Bert, you didn't consciously get told, okay, you didn't get told, but you were told to go to the United States. Yes. And you were told to go to the United States. Yes. And you were told to go t
o the United States. Yes. And you were told to go to the United States. Yes. And you were told to go to the United States. Yes. And you were told to go to the United States. Yes. And you were told to's still called Negro today. Yes. Yes. All right, so Bert, you didn't consciously get told, okay, don't use that word Negro, we're going to use black. You didn't get told that, did you? No, I didn't get told that, but that was like the programming from the radio and the television and whatever, churc
h and things things where they started to change it that way and just the basic dialogues yes and what year were you born sixty one sixty four? fifty nine oh fifty nine so so yeah so you're teens uh... before teens preteen and that is when this is changing and you're going to absorb it as a kid. Yes. Okay, so he's, so Zappa says, one of my favorite Negro and groups, no, there should be no and sign in there, one of my favorite Negro groups during the 50s was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Thei
r work was some of the most important sociosexual true to life commentary of that era. For instance, and he names a song, Stingy Little Thing. There's the thing. There it is. Stingy Little Thing. In brackets, a song in protest about girls who wouldn't put out, put out in quotes, wouldn't have sex. He goes, Stingy Little Thing, Work With Me Annie, and Annie Had a Baby. He names these three songs. Songs like these got played on the air every once in a while. The kids would hear Annie had a baby an
d say, hey, quote, hey, here's a song about a girl getting pregnant, unquote, and rush to tune it in. You know, it was like the forbidden. But an official, so they would hear it occasionally and rush to tune in. But an official of the station, in brackets, with teenage children of his own to protect, close brackets, would quote, lay a pink memo on it, unquote, and the song would sort of disappear, disappear in quotes. The visor men, meanwhile, were magically purifying all this stuff. Work with m
e, Annie, here's the actual lyrics, lyrics please don't cheat give me all my meat that's in brackets quoted work with me andy through the wisdom of their craft became dance with me henry i heard a click you guys still there or did I? I'm still there. We're here. So, work with me Annie became dance with me Henry and the lyrics went from please don't cheat give me all my meat became if you want romancing you better learn some dancing. So that was the meme war, the cultural meme war caused by this
new radio environment which was caused by television usurping the role of radio. So radio became a ghetto where they put the teen music in, right? This is a side effect of television. Yeah. A war in the older media. All right. So shall we continue? Should we do something else? Sure. Continue. Okay. Maybe the thing that we lost our identity with the electric environment and even you became a black woman sort of helped to integrate. I missed the first part. What did you say? Do it again. I didn't
get it really what you're saying. Something did something? Yes, that with the electronic environment we lost our identity yeah in a way I think that's not for the integration of different ethnicities yeah are you saying you know you didn't say even you became a black woman. Yes, I adapted immediately. I knew where the bucks were. I knew where the money was going. I had a green visor. I just pretended I didn't know what it meant. I was one of the original guys. I think I sold the green visors to
the little wrecking crew. I think I came up with it and marketed them. Another bunch of million bucks I made. We had Cuban cigars back then before 1959 when Castro fucked things up and ruined the cigar market, but we had them in the fifties. So you say, now this is the integration, Roxy. Yes, of course the the population was being made discarnate, but in was coming the digital media, which was going to recreate pyramidal hierarchies, and the integration stuff was dropped by 1980. Even though peo
ple worked and lived in integrated offices and all that, socially the blacks were being ostracized and there was war with the Puerto Ricans and other people, other groups, it was just chaos in America because digital media could retrieve your private literate self, pseudo literate self. So you had all the parents sending their kids to private schools. Are you there, guys? Yes. What's happening? The fragmentation. So there was co-anesthesia, integration happening on the chemical body, but electro
nic and digital media were going to cause more synesthesic fragmentation. Culturally, racially, politically, correctness, all this stuff started happening. Political correctness is the attempt of co-anesthesia to create a patina of unity, of integration. But more and more, society is really fragmenting. So there was a patina of integration for a few minutes, but later technologies undermined that. Now you have the kids on Web 2.0, the rumors are that they are very, they don't even notice a chemi
cal body. Right? So they have these raves. What was that called? That kind of dancing where everybody get together and bounce to that guy? We used to play his music, T Tesseroni or Testo or somebody. Tiesto and uh... everybody be Eben told me that the value is that everybody loves everybody regardless of race that's part of the celebration in these uh... post-rave raves whatever they're called you know about them? No. Now we know. Bob, the man with the little green visor documenting the changes
in society. Okay, so I'm going to, we're going to stop. Roxy's only got half an hour left. So why don't we continue this awesome article. I think we've proven we don't need to read any more to prove our point. But we will read more next week to find more points. The upcoming chapters are quite interesting, really. Yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah. Very. I totally forgot about it. And so after Green Visors, the next section is called Vaseline. Then after that, 72 Tracks and Ichiku Park. That was
a famous song in 1968, Ichiku Park. 72 Tracks and Ichiku Park, Digression No. 3. Then he has Audience Education. Then the Jimi Hendrix Phenomenon. Digression number three, then he has audience education, then the Jimi Hendrix phenomenon. And oh, here it is, the gas company, the electric company, and the music company. Digression number four. Now there he is, time with the media. The gas company, the electric company, and the music company. Amazing. Pretty neat, eh? Yes. Yes. And it's better to
say all this rather than write out a book. Imagine typing all this out. You can't even say as much as you can verbally. So what... Yes, and Matt Lewin was also exploring all these corporations' identities, how we replace the individual that was so important during the Gutenberg election with these groups, these new tribes like the corporations, the football team. Right. Yeah. Very interesting. The group mind. And you see a lot of that in cultures are business that you were referring to. The ads,
right, show that trend change. Yes. Okay. It's very interesting how McLuhan always says he was just exploring. And in the video I sent to you, Gayle Zappa, she's in the Viennale de Venezia and she says Zappa always said he was just exploring and he went out to explore and came back to report. They were doing the same thing. They were journalists. Now, who said, did you say Gayle Zappa said this? Who said that? Yes, I sent you the video. It's on your mail. Just now? An interview with Gail? Yes.
Zappa Explorer. Most of it is in Italian, but she says, Zappa always said he was just exploring and he came back to report. Wow, isn't that amazing? And he was saying, he didn't know much about McLuhan, but he was saying the same. McLuhan always said, I don't explain, I explore. And here's Frank saying the same thing. It's pretty interesting. Maybe every one of the people on my Android Meme chart, like Kroker,aker Thompson McLuhan Garrett LaRouche maybe all the same fucking thing This variation
of the same attitude study like I go say the same tribe Yes, the people who are not They're all expressing Bob's now. I knew all this from my Secret Council 10 work, so they're all chips off of me. They're all tempting to be me. I'm trying to be like Bob. I'm just exploring. He works for the solar government. He gets paid to do this, but I'm going to try to do some music about it. And another thing, they both always say that they were not specialists. Right. They were just general assistants. Th
ey were also autodidactic in their probes. Right, now he is, there's a good point, he's writing this article as if he's been out there, he's researching and he's reporting back. All he had to do was talk to his manager and Hal Zeiger, who dropped over every other day anyway. So he did research but not even leaving home. He just talked to his friends and they gave him the facts. And he makes his clinical technical report in Life Magazine. It's like a lab report. What's interesting, Frank, is that
he was considered a juvenile delinquent, but he really turned everything over. I mean, he was a juvenile delinquent, technically by the standards of society, but he really educated himself and became a monster, really a big monster to be able to point the finger at everything that he was sensing with the electricity and the whole music industry i think the commercial he was really fast i was listening this week in reading what flamed him so much was ignorance and stupidity and the commercialism
of music the commercialist music just took everything away, and he sort of was pissed off I mean he he said at one time that he a Lot of his inspiration came through things he hated And then kind of things makes me think of what I heard is something McLuhan that the McLuhan Was pointing out Yes uh... was pointing out yes what are you trying to remember? he said if i talk about something you can be sure i'm against it yeah, that's it yeah and so they they were like patriotic citizens and educato
rs and remember Zappa is also thinking of running for president he's going to get Tom Wilson to run for president in 1968 there's an election going on and he's going to he's going to form the interested party so here's Frank talking like an advisor to a president he's talking maturely you know this is what our society is these are the issues before us today but uh... what was that about he uh before us today but uh... i was able to hear being against something uh... the yeah he's really as a pro
per music teacher he doesn't like the way society is ruining the aesthetic art form he really values the years and that's a valid uh... therapy or valid valid role. Yes. Unfortunately, he was an agent of the Android Meme, and the Android Meme wasn't going to wait for anybody. So Frank was duped by the Android Meme, or some part of Frank was. Jesse McLuhan was, and they all were. Paul Krasner, everybody. They all were duped. They couldn't see coldly like a solar government agent could see. We ope
rated very coldly. We looked over the planet every day. We did not try to save species. As a matter of fact, iON, we're not here to help you. We're just here for the Ascendant. We're just here for the ascended we're just here to make fun of you yeah that was frank and McLuhan pretty close to that attitude okay i want to just read let's read another name more names on the uh... zappa album Freak Out album the names that made frank super intelligent number twenty three is joe polley they say unkno
wn personage Freak Out album, the names that made Frank super intelligent. Number 23 is Joe Pauly. They say, unknown personage, probably a personal friend of Frank Zappa, Joe Pauly. We don't know that. Don and Dewey, R&B duo whom Frank Zappa used to see perform at the El Monte Legion Stadium. They recorded a number of classic R&B singles for the Specialty label. Violinist Don, so Don and Dewey, but Don was a violinist. Violinist Don Sugarcane Harris went on to record and perform with Frank in 69
and 70. Isn't that neat? He used to see these guys when he was a teenager and he remembered them and brought them into his band, you know, 15 years later. And then Don Sugarcane Harris went and became famous and he became a member of the Jefferson Airplane after playing with Frank for a while. So, Frank retrieved and saved the guy. Lee Zagon, personal friend of Frank Zappa. So they know Lee Zagon, Z-A-G-O-N, as a personal friend. No other information is known. He probably liked, he's probably o
ne of the guys he played Ionization to and the guy liked it, so he gets honored for liking Varese. Right? Yeah. Steve Mann, Los Angeles-based blues guitarist. Steve Mann, Los Angeles-based blues guitarist. Steve Mann, Los Angeles-based blues guitarist. Briefly joined the Mothers in 1966. So they were called the Mothers in 66. Skip Diamond, Los Angeles-based musician, likely a personal friend of Frank Zappa and the Mothers. He recorded backing vocals for the Hallelujah album by Canned Heat, featu
ring ex-mother Henry Vesting. I think it was Henry Vesting that Frank lived with in Laurel Canyon before he moved in with Tootsie Cream Cheese, Pamela's Rubica. So he left the mothers and did the backing vocals for a song by Cand Heat. And it was in the band. I mean, he probably did more than that. Now here comes a nod to to the House of Mexico Sylvester Revueltas. Revueltas. Did you ever meet him? Yes. No no that the whole family was very artistic The sister was an actress here in Berlin by the
Berliner ensemble and and there was one the other brother was a very important writer, but he Was in jail because he was into revolution and this very radical So he was in that would be in the 60s you come on 60s and 70s was into revolution and this very radical. So he was in- That would be in the 60s? You're talking about 60s and 70s? Yeah, 50s, 60s, yeah. Right. And so how old, is Sylvester still alive? Are these older people? No, those are like from the time of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera. Lik
e in the 40s. Oh, that's a long time ago. So they were born in the 30s or something, or no? They were, no, these people, they were born the same year as McLuhan. They're McLuhan's generation, 1911. Yeah, with the music of Roberto Revolta, he was into this nationalist style. That was something that was going on everywhere in the world. Most composers were retrieving traditional folk music scales and songs and making a cover of that in a more symphonic way. Okay, so Richard. in a more symphonic wa
y. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, so that was the, yeah, in the 19th century, they started going around, that's the beginning of merging low brow and high brow. They were looking for rhythms and themes in folk music, right? Yes, and because that was a time in Mexico where artists thought they have to educate the people too, and they have to like the muralists were going to show the history to the people, and the artists were telling the non-Europeans that their culture is also as important and valuable a
s the European culture. And yes, like we talk about how the high culture and the low culture, the popular culture somehow melted. There was also this melting between the industrial European culture and the ethnic, national, tribal culture, many different cultures. That would be caused by the telegraph. That would be the beginning of breaking down visual space. So the guys would be attracted to oral culture. They start to get this oral retrieval with the telegraph. Because Sylvester. First, there
was this nationalism, like with the Nazis. Everybody became nationalist at the beginning with the radio. Yes. And who did you say? Onassis? What was the name you said? The Nazis. The Germans. Oh, the Nazis. Nazi. Nazis. Right. Well, guess what? Sylvester Revueltas, born in 1899, and he only lasted 41 years. He died in 1940. So you didn't meet him but you, they list siblings, Jose, Ferriman, Rosura and Consuelo. Are you saying you met some of those? No, but they were very well known as artists,
but they were more like very radical socialists. Yeah, like Rivera. What's his name? No, I think even more than that. Because Rivera worked for Rockefeller, and he was just being quadrophrenic. He said he was communist, but he was working for Rockefeller and for... Yeah. Making big murals for Ford and all this big capital. Okay, so did you meet personally any of the Revueltos family? No. Okay, I thought you said you did, so you didn't. So, here's Zappa listening to Guy, and it says, Mexican comp
oser and violinist, one of the more obscure influences on Frank Zappa. So that's pretty neat. Arnold Schoenberg, Austrian composer. His pioneering experiments in, among other forms, atonality were hugely influential on a number of similarly forward-thinking modernist composers who followed in Schoenberg's wake, including Anton Webern and Frank Zappa. Then there's Joe Perrino, keyboardist and one-time member of Frank Zappa's high school R&B group, The Blackouts. Later leader of a lounge band, Joe
Perino and the Meltones, who Zappa was a member of in 1961 and 62. And Jerry Uhlberg, another one of Frank Zappa's English teachers at Antelope Valley High School, was somehow coerced into performing on an unreleased Zappa-Don Van Vliet track called, quote, The Search for Tom Dooley. There was a famous song around Search for Tom Dooley. There was a famous song around 1960 called Tom Dooley, I think, and he disappeared in the jungles. He was a missionary or something. So this teacher, Jerry Ulbe
rg, was coerced into performing with Frank and Don on The Search for Tom Dooley. Then, 32, Donna number one, unknown personage. The placement of this name in the list gives no hint as to who this Donna may have been. In brackets, the list is generally fairly logical if you think about it. Donna number two, another unknown personage. Wonder if these Donnas knew they had been mentioned on the cover of a major rock album release. Then the writer says, however, I digress. So yes, do they know? Leopo
ld, no, Loeb and Leopold, they were infamous murderers, not saying murderers, infamous murders. Oh, I guess the murders that they were associated with. They were convicted for the murder of a 14 year old boy, an act committed for no reason other than to commit the perfect crime. Also the name of Frank Zappa and Ray Collins semi-folk duo act, they performed at the Tuber Door in LA in the early 1960s. So they did Loeb and Leopold, I can't remember, I think they were framed, they were anarchists. T
hey got framed for, just like Frank got framed. And then the other frame up, you've got Loeb and Leopold, so this is logical. Sacco and Franzetti. They were Italian immigrants who in one of the most outrageously and willfully mishandled cases in United States history were convicted of a pair of murders which they did not commit despite overwhelming evidence attesting to their innocence and even the confession of a man who claimed he was the actual killer. The pair was later executed for the crim
e. It is easy to see why, even on a much smaller scale, Frank Zappa might have been able to sympathize with their story, having also endured a miscarriage of justice the year before in Cucamonga. Let me just see if Leopold, Loeb and... I have to get ready. Thank you so much. And enjoy. Yes, so we got up to number 35 and that's good and you made great contributions and we appreciate your ongoing participation. I'm sorry you're being coerced to do this but I need the money. Yes, we're here for the
culture. Maybe there will be iON next week. I don't know if iON shows up, I don't know when we are going to do this. Well, it doesn't matter. We will do it when we can. Yeah, when we can. Okay, Bert and I will go into other matters. We'll see who's – let me see anybody listening. So thanks a lot. Okay, bye. Okay, bye. Bye. Geez, Bert's not even here. Where's Bert? I'm all by myself. Hello, there's Sean. Do you want to say something, Sean? Bert got knocked out. Did I get knocked out? I'm putting
in Leopold, Loeb and Leopold. Let's see. Did they? Were they framed? Where are they framed? Still looking it up. Leopold and Loeb trial. Okay, so they were two wealthy students at the University of Chicago who in May 1924 kidnapped and murdered. So I guess they did it. They committed the murder, widely characterized at the time as a crime of the century, as a demonstration of their perceived intellectual superiority, which they thought rendered them capable of carrying out a perfect crime and a
bsolved them of responsibility for their actions. After the men were arrested, the parents retained Clarence Darrow, he went on and did the evolution trial, or had already done it, I don't know. As counsel for the defense. Darrow's 12-hour-long summation at their sentencing hearing is noted for its influential criticism of capital punishment as retributive rather than transformative justice. Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment plus 99 years. Loeb was killed by a fellow prisoner in 1936
and this all happened in 24 or 25. Leopold was released on parole in 1958. The murder of the kid, Robert, the kid's Bob Frank, combination of me, Robert Frank, Bob Frank. The murder of Frank has been the inspiration of several works in film, theater and literature, such as the 1929 play Rope by Patrick Hamilton and Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the play in the 1948 film of the same name. Later movies such as Compulsion and Swoon were also based on the crime. So Frank, what is he, what's, he's
killing people. Frank considers his art, his attempt to become President of the United States as the perfect crime, that must be the meaning for bringing them in. Bert, you're back Bert? Yes. How much did you miss? Probably missed about five minutes. Had a problem with Skype getting back on. Probably missed about five minutes. Had a problem with Skype getting back on. Okay. So, um, I need to take a drink, so I'm going to play a little music for a minute, and we'll figure out what we're going to
do next. Did you hear that? Loeb and Leopold, they, um, did murder the kid, trying to do the perfect crime. Why would Frank list them? He's got Sanko and Vanzetti, they were framed, that's known I guess. So then Leopold and Loeb, they represent Frank attempting the perfect crime, becoming President of the United States through infiltrating youth culture. So he's killing, he's killing, and the kid that was killed was Robert Franks, that's Bob Frank, that's me. It's a combination of us. But it's
like Frank knows he's killing the 14 year old if they start to be interested in Frank's world. Socially killing them. There's the metaphor. They'll become alienated outsiders by hanging out with Frank. Well, Burp, just you and me, Burp. Bob, that was awesome. Wasn't that awesome? Wasn't that awesome? Man. Over an hour of I and I's music. Let me read you some of the reviews. Did you look at the... Yes, I saw it. Andrew, Andrew, Pamela and 94,.94. Mateo is back there. Liss, that's where I stopped
reading. I have to go back there. First of all, is that Andrew HK? Is that the legends friend Andrew? Yes. That guy has been absent for about a year now. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a ye
ar. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he's been gone for a year. I think he, is that Andrew HK? Is that the legend's friend Andrew? Yes. The guy who's been absent for about a year. I wonder why he's back. Why don't you call in Andrew and see what's up with you, man. I was thinking the same. Just call in. Yes. You haven't got I in here to make fun of you. We'll be softer, we'll be gentler. So what you have here is, way back there, we were talking about
Augmenter, copy, copy, copy, you're right, copy right. And Andrew says, art was hypnosis and death. Now all our art of the living dead. Good, that's not bad, it's an opening statement. Needs more elaboration. You don't wanna stay stuck on the word art. Now all are art because after art comes archetype. And then the last word gets recycled. E-truth says, hi all. And Andrew says, media seek to speak to. Social media seeks to speak at. Yeah? Yeah, media seek to speak to. Social media seeks to speak
at. Yeah, it's okay. Robert, thunderous activity trickling in the humble media bowl of Agatha Krispy's. Thunderous activity trickling in the humble media bowl of Agatha Krispy's. Thunderous activity trickling in the humble media bowl of Agatha Krispy's. I guess Agatha Krispy is a detective, right? Yes. So process looking who did the perfect crime. And then Liz says, good evening, good evening. Mateo says, what does it mean when you experience Portal, still alive, YouTube, Zom, purchase Xbox, 36
0 game, play few levels, and then a few hours later, Ayan requests Bob to play the song on Payday. Does it mean that Ayan knows what you're doing, Mateo? What does it mean when you experience Portal still alive, YouTube sound, purchase Xbox, 360 game, play a few levels? I guess he was just doing that. And then a few hours later, iON requests Bob to play the song on payday. Well, we were talking about the word Portal, and you could claim you evoked that, Mateo. And then iON wanted to send in its
use of the word Mateo. So it's 50-50 whether iON's addressing you or not. Pamela says, when you search through a cardboard box of papers from Web 1.0 in the garage and find a corner of a page that reads 1111 and subsequently mentions Bob, LOL. So I guess that happened to her. When you search through a cardboard box of pages from Web 1.0 in the garage and find a corner of her page that reads 1111 and subsequently mentions Bob. Then she says from 2004, Andrew says, Mary Joan Wana, it's not just a
lesbian gay bee happening. LGB, is that lesbian gay something? Andrew says Orson O. Wells and FDR florists conspire to reform the tax code soundtrack to the movie. Then 94 says great Zapposet, Bob. Then Anders says, Black Lives Matter, Bob. And then Anders says, true, I'm hanging, no, 94 says, I got your language hanging, boy. Then Anders says, true, I'm hanging in there by a thread. Anders says, some uh, 94 says, yeah, this is balls to the wall. Let's see where you go from here. I guess he mean
t that one song or did he mean the whole set up to that point? Anyways, I then played something and he said, nice antidote. Then Andrew says, some of the best toe happening, some of the best toe tapping. Then 94 says, look Ma, Bob is playing the radio. And he says, Bob's preferred musical instrument. And he says, Ma is mighty impressed. Then he says, by the way Ma, all harmonic climates are being slash have been subsumed by iON and the new environment, leaving Bob with the initial climate of the
fall and mixtape of what happened after the fall and a manual for getting back to God. Yes, that's not bad, Bert. What do you think? I'm providing the initial initial climate of the fall and mixtape of what happened after the fall and a manual for getting back to God yes Yes, what I'm was doing I used to do that Now we've arrived We don't have to do it anymore Then he said and who says here we call that a manual of labor May your garden bloom forever Bob May your garden bloom forever, Bob. Then
Pamela says, thanks Bob, I on Carolin. Then 94 says, the I sell garden. I say, I like that, ionized. Pamela goes, yeah, maybe to the music, I'm not sure. Andrew says, Saint E. Claus' gift is appreciated. Santa Claus, Santa E. Saint E. Claus' gift. Yes, maybe I was saying Santa Claus rather than Santa Claus, Santa E, Saint E. Claus's gift. Yes, maybe I was saying Santa Claus rather than Santa Claus. We didn't ask him to spell it. But he did list the characteristics. Watching the list of who's no
t a knight, that's Santa Claus stuff. Then I tell Pamela I'm looking at her pictures she sent me, sent them earlier in the day or something, I just got around now. She goes and, I put on an embarrassed face. Then I, no, no, she goes and, she puts on an embarrassed face. Then I say still assessing, she looks sad, then she looks happy, then she winked, no, then I winked, so she's sad and then embarrassed. I guess that's the embarrassed icon. And then I winked in 94, it says, good night, Melbourne.
Why, was that the Melbourne, is that where it was done, 94, Melbourne? Stairway to heaven? And then Pamela says, hilarious, 94. And then Pamela says, it's the festive season. And Cheryl Sherry in New York says great Zappa's music, Bob. Great DJ Bob, like always. With a smiley. And that's where we stand. The votes are still coming in. But it looks like Bob has got the majority locked up. It doesn't matter if they'll even be in opposition now. Right? Yes. So, Bert, what issues do you want to disc
uss before we go to the rewrite? Bob, I was reading the mother of all interviews. Just a minute, Bert. Just a minute. Is. Just a minute. Is that me? No. Okay, that's me. I'm just thinking, is there someone else here? No. Okay, you're just reading what? The mother of all interviews. And the interviewer is asking Frank about how he was a... He's appeared to be a mentor of all young foster unknown people's careers. And Frank mentions that it has something to do with fractals. Have you ever heard of
that? That his wrenches are fractals? No. I'll read it. I'll read it. Yeah. I've never heard him talk about fractals. He's mentioned isotopes, but I don't know about fractals. Is the mother of all interviews Eric somebody and another guy You know It's like a nice just after mine Maybe 89 90 It's Don mean Don man, yeah That's a guitar magazine or something. Yeah, that's a professional interview. Okay, yeah, that's a guitar magazine or something. Yeah, that's a professional interview. Okay, I hav
e that. I haven't looked at it in a long time. I could look it up. Do you want me to check it out and look at it at the same time as you? Yes, because it's quite interesting because Frank goes on to describe about his use of polyrhythmic subdivisions. and that reminds him of fractals. Okay, Den Sims. What year would this be? In the eighties? Nineteen... Nineteen ninety-four. 1994. Oh, that's after he died. Geez, they don't have it listed on this site. It's from a definitive tribute to Frank Zapp
a, best guitar player in 1994. The last days of Frank Zappa, but yeah, unfortunately they don't have a top of page. Okay, so I have to go to another site. Do you have the link? Do you want to send me the link? Let's see if I can find it, because I copied it into a Word document. I'll find the link. Hold on. Hey, I think we can actually read the Uncle Meat Bulletin. I have it here. This one site has the Uncle Meat story. But maybe you have to wait until next week. So I'm looking through. What wou
ld that be called? The mother, maybe under M. No? I'll send you a link, Bob. I found it. Okay. Part one. Part one. Mateo says, the other pattern perhaps. Zappa is still alive, especially on Pedi. The other pattern perhaps. So what's Mateo referring to? He's talking about himself. What does it mean when you experience, oh, okay, it means the other pattern, the other world, the other pattern perhaps. It's still alive, especially on payday. Yes. Are you sending it to the chat line, Bert, or my emai
l? I can post it in the chat line. I send it to iON. I send it to your iON email, but I can post it on the chat and I'll send it to iON. I'll send it to your iON email, but I can post it on the chat as well. Roxanna posted on my... maybe on her Facebook, but on my Facebook too. She has a little, you know, those little bulbs you put on trees Christmas tree bulb yeah and she says ho ho ho it says on it has a beard his Zappa's mustache and goatee or whatever and then it says zappa on this Christmas
tree bulb and she goes ho ho ho get ready for the thunders. I'm so happy I could cry. That's the kind of people who post in my Facebook. My Facebook? Yeah, I'm not fooled by Android me, right? Trying to tell me. You mean to tell me I have a Facebook page? All right, there it is. Okay, so put in the word. What was the word? Fractals. Fractals. Fractals. So, if you just go up before, German, the kind of lesson he that gave us our German laughs. So about the Ensemble Modern, I think, some woman ha
d a great time hanging out with him. So then he says, you gave them all these opportunities. You have a reputation for being a mentor of the young and or foster of unknown people's careers. How did that happen? I think there probably something to do with fractals. The more I think about fractals, the more the whole idea of fractals relates closely to what I do. Well, I was explaining the fractal earlier many hours ago. Somebody posts the Bob head. Yeah, the JR Bob Dobbs head on my site or on the
Facebook and so it's got the traditional Dobbs face. So then it's made up of all these little dots. So you go into the dots and they become little Bob Dobbs heads. So the big head is made up of the little ones. So I explained how that was the interplay of co-anesthesia and synesthesia. Co-anesthesia being the integrated tendency toward a centralized icon. That's the image you first see. But then it fragments, decentralizes into micro Bob heads. So Frank, his work is one big album. You get all t
hese little reflections of the big album as separate parts inside the fractal. So we could agree with that. So the guy goes, how so? Now, do you want to read something about this or we just read it? You can read it. Go ahead. The guy says, how so? Well, if you're trying to define order out of chaos, that's a little bit presumptuous. But then on the other hand, so is the concept of chaos. So I would say that the fractal theory falls in the class between those two attitudes, right? That's right. I
t's tactility. It's interplay between synesthesia and co-anesthesia. And rhythmically, if you're dividing the universe into twos and threes, which is basically what happens with all polyrhythmic subdivisions, you are to some degree missing the boat, the fractal boat. If you can think of rhythm as an extension of the fractal universe instead of even subdivisions of twos and threes grouped into 11s and 13s or whatever, if you can think of microsecond relationships as being valid components of poly
rhythms, then you're getting closer to the way I view things. This is good, this is probably an explained digital data. Never saw this, well I read this 20 years ago, but have not re-read it. And if you can, transferring that into the anthropological domain, how I wind up being, in your words, a mentor to these kinds of people. It just seems that the odds are in my favor that if I keep doing what I'm doing, we will meet. Yeah, that's true. That's a dobsound talk. So then the guy says, you made t
he comment that listeners accept polyrhythms in their music and African drum music with much greater ease than they do dissonance. Why is it that harmony seems to linger around so much? And Frank says, rap music may bring an end to that. Think about it. What is so precariously consonant about spoken words? It used to be in order to have something acceptable as broadcast material or even listenable material, it had to be saturated with consonants. And although rap music is not dealing with harmon
ic combinations of major and minor seconds, it is certainly dealing in dissonance. The guy says, that's true. You've done a lot with spoken material too, such as that thing with Steve Vai tracking your voice. Tapas says, oh yes, on Dangerous Kitchen. Yeah, well, where he wrote the, well, I'd have to call it a scat, because there's no other word for it. It's on that jazz discharge party hats. It's on that and that jazz discharge party hats. He transcribed it and then learned it on the guitar, the
n played it on the record. But I think that the other better example of spoken material would be something like Dumb All Over. spoken material would be something like dumb all over. Why is it okay to hear really strange rhythms but not to hear really strange harmonies? Well, arguing the other position, people do assimilate really strange harmonies when they are accompanied by the appropriate image. Do you mean like in horror movie music when the maniacal slasher is about to come?" Zappa says, ex
actly. The other guy says, it's got to be visually triggered. Well, says Frank, the society has been so saturated with visual data and the audio that goes along with those pictures stays in your tissue, kind of like dioxin. And you hear the slasher music, you know what slasher texture is. You know slasher harmony. And if you hear anything that sounds like slasher music, you know what slasher texture is, you know slasher harmony. And if you hear anything that sounds like slasher harmony and there
's no slasher, you're still going to feel the slasher. The interviewer says, then the question becomes, have the visual media people create the proper image to go with the sound? Frank says, well, if I were going to do a slasher movie, I could be a lot scarier than the shit that they stick in there. I thought that the pinnacle, the thing that everybody has gone for since it was established as a slasher norm, was the squeak, squeak, squeak from Psycho. Most film scoring for tense moments runs in
gamut from squeak, squeak, squeak to the filter opening up on the mini-mood on the low note. Not much in between there. How, the guy then says, how do you think Schubert would feel knowing that the unfinished symphony is the Smurfs theme? Well, how do you think that the people of America would feel if they knew where the Smurfs came from? They were an advertising device for British Petroleum. When we went to Holland for the first time with a band with Mark and Howard in 70 or 71, the whole place
was riddled with fucking Smurfs advertising British Petroleum. And the joke in the band was, Smurf me, because on the billboards that's what they said, Smurf me, spelled M-E-E-E. I don't know what it means, but to go from that to what we now have is a family of Smurfs with their own personalities. According to Ahmet, who saw the spectacle on television, he witnessed an interview with a guy who was one of the Smurf voices, taking himself so seriously that it beggared description. I mean, he did
about a five-minute routine on this guy. His son Ahmet did. Then the interviewer says, there's our cultural hero. And again, it gets me back thinking of guitar heroes and why they are gunslingers. In your touring days with rock bands, did you see guys out there playing air guitar? Sure. What is that? How come girls don't do it? Well, because their tits get in the way, for one thing. Same reason why you don't see that many girl guitar players unless they're handling it at a low altitude. But I th
ink it's probably because girls are too smart to play air guitar. If ever there was something that the women's liberation movement could use to prove the inferiority of the male species, it's the extremely low number of women who play air guitar. I resemble that remark. I'm a professional air guitarist, proud of the talent. Yeah, and Frank's been hanging out in his library too long. Let's see, we haven't talked about your business. As I understand it, you and Gail handle everything. In the house
, we have three offices. We've got one upstairs in the bedroom where I do all the liner notes and that kind of word processing stuff. Gail has an office and then there's another office, just you come in the gate that we use for all the phone transactions and that kind of stuff. We have a lab, we have a studio, we have an editing facility, three vaults for tape and film. That's all right there, that's all right here where we live. There's two other buildings in the San Fernando Valley. One of the
m is Joe's Garage which is a rehearsal facility. Then there's our warehouse where all the equipment stuff comes out of. Gail runs all that. Why did you decide to handle all these things yourselves? Well, I would say there's a certain hose job factor in there, but in reality, it's just good business sense. What's the hose job factor? They got hosed? Nobody else would help them? Well, maybe. From what I know of hose job, it's sort of like somebody uses you. So it's like a Ho's job. Well, he'd get
used if he used someone else, is what he's saying. Be more expensive, probably. What's in that huge vault downstairs? Frank says, since the early 70s, I've collected every interview, every performance clip, everything that was done around the world that I could get a copy of. Then there's all the rest of the footage from Baby Snakes, the movie, The Baby Snakes, or Baby Snake. The accounts of every documentary that was done in Europe and every place else. And then there's videotape, every format
from two-inch to digital video and all stops in between. Plus all the masters, all the road tapes, and all the one-quarter inch tapes from Cucamonga. That's way back there. The audio tapes go back to 55. Wow. That's pretty amazing. So early on, you were careful about keeping things and keeping them in order. Well, being a pack rat is something, but keeping it in order is another thing. In other words, it's a hellacious chore for someone. Frank says, well, the vault is very well organized, and I
know where stuff is, but nobody else does. In order to put it in a condition where anybody could go in there and find anything any time they needed it, it would take about a year and a barcode generator. Even a student intern wouldn't know what the fuck to do with it, because many of the road tapes have never even been listened to. They are still gaffered shut just the way they came off the road. And in order to log it, you've got to listen to it. And what intern is even going to know what he's
hearing? And the mental notes that I have about what's on those tapes is not only what the tunes are, but where the good versions are. And your only other option to leaving the stuff scattered like that is to go through the arduous process of making logs of everything, clip the good takes out, collate them and start yet another library. Does it frustrate you that it's impossible to do all of these things as fast as you would want to? Frank says, yes. Let me put it to you another way. If I could,
I'd keep my studio running 24 hours a day. For some of those things that need to be done on the studio level, I don't need to be in the control room with the engineer. I could just give instructions. And because the board is automated, once you've done a mix, if anything needs to be changed in the mix, all it's got to do is go back and tweak a couple of faders and rerun it, and no time is lost. But this engineer that I'm working with, Spence, is a mutant. Because not only does he understand old
analog technology, he's still a vinyl guy at home, and he's one of these guys that likes tube amplifiers and all that kind of stuff, but he knows how to operate all of the digital recording equipment. He understands the sonic solutions, and he can even operate that aspect of the sync clavier that interfaces with the recording machines. In other words, I could leave him alone. I could say, quote, call up this sequence, do this, this, this, and this, unquote. And he knows how to run all these thi
ngs. Now, there's not too many recording engineers that I know of that have a hands-on experience with all this gear and do it right. And he's got real good ears for balancing things. I would need three guys, I would need three guys like that in order to run three eight-hour shifts in there. And I feel lucky that I can get him four days a week, ten hours a day. But you know, at the end of the day, when he's got to go back to his wife, I'm sitting there going, quote, oh, well, we almost got that
one done, unquote. It drives you crazy a little bit. But then on the other hand, if I were just to hire, if I were to just hire a bunch of guys to move the faders up and down, I wouldn't get the good result." Good result in quotes. And besides, all these people have very unique personalities. Todd is truly a unique and mysterious character. Same with Don Doris and the same with Chris Lou. And fortunately, they all get along with each other. It's very amusing to be in the same room with these thr
ee guys trying to have a conversation with each other. I really enjoy it. And that's the end of part one. So that's a pretty good section.
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Thank you Sir !