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The 100 best musicians of all time: Frank Zappa – Essay by Trey Anastasio
In the early years of Phish, people often told us that we sound like “Frank Zappa meets The Gratful Dead”. That sounds very bizarre, but it is true that Zappa was incredibly important to me. I even believe that-in addition to Hendrix-he was the best e-guitarist at all. Zappa approached the instrument from a very own perspective – both sound and rhythmic: everything that was accepted as a supposedly godly limit aroused his curiosity all the more.
I will never forget how I saw him live in New York for the first time; I went to school back then. He left his guitar on the stand to first conduct the band. And he didn’t grab the guitar until everything sat perfectly. And then this moment came – where the whole audience took the breath away – where he went to the guitar, strapped it and then burned down a murderous solo.
In 1988 I saw him in Vermont on his last tour. He played the solo in “City of Tiny Lites”, in which except drummer Chad Wackerman all leaves the stage. I was sitting on the balcony on the stage side, and when Zappa turned away from the audience to play with chad, I saw this broad grin on his face. And at the same time it was the man who put the tricky orchestra compositions like “The Yellow Shark” on paper! It is difficult to imagine how a single person dominated so many different things.
Zappa gave me the belief that everything is possible in music
When I started writing music for Phish, he was an eminently important guide. Songs such as “You Enjoy MySelf” and “Split Open and Melt” were designed in detail because I had learned from him how to do it. When I appeared at the Bonnaroo Festival with my ten-member band, we played two cover versions: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “Sultans of Swing”. And in both songs the wind players played the guitar solo, grade for grade. I would never have come up with the idea if I hadn’t seen Zappa in Vermont, where he had his wind group in unison Jimmy Pages solo solo from “Stairway to Heaven”.
Frank drove his musicians to the utmost of their technical possibilities, and with Phish we try something similar: we take our four instruments and try to tease everything out of them.
Zappa gave me the belief that everything is possible in music when he said: “Look here, they are all just instruments. Take care of them and find out what they can and not. And then start writing.”