By Ed Symkus

Frank Zappa didn’t like being interviewed, but he sure enjoyed having a chat.

Frank & Co – Conversations with Frank Zappa 1977-1993 by Co de Kloet. Foreword by Dweezil Zappa. Jawbone Books, 317 pages, $24.95 (paper) 

I discovered Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in the summer of 1966, when the Freak Out! album called to me from a display wall at Krey’s Disc Shop, strongly suggesting I buy it. So, I did, and two hours later, after one listening, I had become a full-fledged fan. A similar thing happened to Co de Kloet, the saxophonist, composer, radio producer, and author of Frank & Co who, as a young Dutch lad, listened to his father’s copy of Freak Out! and, he writes, “My musical perception was completely changed forever.”

Zappa was already Co’s idol by the time he, at age 14, first saw the Mothers perform, at a 1973 concert in Amsterdam. He caught the band again three years later, and would go on to see every Zappa performance in Holland right through his final one in 1988. But it was in 1977, when Co was 18, just about done with high school, that a right time, right place, right mood scenario led to his first talk with Zappa.

Because his father was a Dutch radio producer and knew people who worked at Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, to which Zappa was then signed, Co was given a chance to speak with his idol. Though at that point in his career Zappa was not exactly thrilled with doing interviews (he would later say of the process, “people who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t talk, in order to prepare articles for people who can’t read”), there was something about this young kid that got him to relax and open up. Knowledgeable questions — concerning songs, albums, musicians, and live performances — led to thoughtful answers.

Constructed chronologically, in Q&A format, the interviews which, over the years as Zappa and Co became friends, evolved into casual chats, are interwoven with Co’s stories about what was going on in his own career as well as with perceptions on how Zappa had been moving from pop music into jazz and then into classical and more experimental sounds.

Among the topics touched on and explained — sometimes briefly, sometimes at length — are the intense audition process Zappa’s musicians had to endure; why he preferred playing shows without intermissions; business dealings that frustrated the always money-conscious Zappa; and his loathing of musicians who lip-sync onstage: he called them frauds and referred to their concerts as “freeze-dried shows.” He’s erudite, but edgier and angrier when addressing censorship, voting rights, America acting as the World Police during the Gulf War, and Christian extremists, specifically mentioning a minister in Indiana who “claimed that if you played the Mr. Ed theme song backwards, it said ‘Satan is the source.’”

But the talk keeps returning to music, about which both Co and Zappa are passionate. A couple of the off-the-cuff chats show Zappa to be a bit short and testy; others present him in good humor; still others give him the opportunity to opine about, say, unfairly forgotten artists such as the Turbans and the Channels, or that fans would likely appreciate his own music more if they first became acquainted with “Bulgarian folk music, Tibetan music, the music of Edgard Varèse, and the music of Anton Webern.”

Though it’s obvious that Co and Zappa, despite their age and cultural differences, were comfortable with each other, a couple of their conversations tend to ramble, and there are a few too many spots in the book where tighter editing would have helped the flow.

For instance:

Co: “Is that [record] going to be released?

Zappa: “Not this year.”

Co: “Not this year?”

Zappa: “No.”

There are also repeated cases of “Mm-hmms” coming from both of them, which should have been edited out.

And while the inclusion of interviews with Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (their alter egos Flo & Eddie were Mothers at one point), original Mothers drummer Jimmy Carl Black, and Pamela Zarubica (fans know her as Suzy Creamcheese) provide some fascinating insight on Zappa, his music, and the times, Co’s lengthy book-ending interview with Zappa cohort Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, feels kind of tacked on.

It’s important to know that Frank & Co is not a biography. Rather, it’s a collection of verbal snapshots of Frank Zappa, a man who, it turns out, shied away from talking about his guitar-playing prowess or his massive influence on the music world. It’s aimed directly at Zappa fans. If you’re one, you need to read it.

Ed Symkus is a Boston native and Emerson College graduate. He went to Woodstock, is a fan of Harry Crews, Sax Rohmer, and John Wyndham, and has visited the Outer Hebrides, the Lofoten Islands, Anglesey, Mykonos, the Azores, Catalina, Kangaroo Island, and the Isle of Capri with his wife Lisa.