“in early january '94 a friend of
mine, stephen, told me to give this bass player craig a call; the rest of '94
was taken up with "the band from
utopia" our zappa-cover band that had five lead-guitarists in nine
months as well as tim, andy and tony; and me practicing and transcribing charts
up to five hours a day to try to get all the drum parts down.
i have great memories of tony the
"mudshark" riding tim "the stallion" on stage dressed in an
ancient roman costume with 200 people screaming "hail caesar!!!!" ...
with tony doing the "welease waddewick" routine ......
we later found out that the ex-zappa
band members were touring as "the band from utopia!", at least we
thought of the name first! they later changed it to "banned from
utopia" because i think gail zappa cracked the shits with them.
anyway, back to the dinky aussie
version: craig wanted to call it quits at the end of the year when the band
self-destructed on stage during "zappatrek" at the grainstore in king
st melbourne, (zappatrek because we did the gig dressed in starfleet uniform and
me hitting the drums with a rubber chicken) but i wanted to keep going, so our
zappaband phase two happened ....
..... it started off with just me,
craig on bass and brett on keyboards; an emerson, lake and palmer kind of lineup
that we re-named "kemerson, kaked and karl karma"; we wanted to
call our first album "farkus" and the single was going to be
"fanfare for the common dickhead" .... but that's another story .....
........ we advertised for musicians
who could read and the only people who rang were peter and angus, so we all got
together at my place during easter '95 and five months later, played our first
gig to 110 people to our complete shock, we thought we'd only pull 20 mates!
..... by then i also had a little tv show called "melbourne musos" on
channel 31.
"the
zappa instrumentaale" (prounounced "aaarrhhlll") as we
decided to call ourselves, played all the hard polyrhythmic instrumental numbers
and bit by bit we had special guests play (and sometimes sing) with us, people
like allan zavod; who played with zappa in '84, richard piper and kate kendall
as guest singers (you can see them pop up on that tv cop-show
"stingers" on channel 9), bob sedergreen, richard lewis, geoff achison
and various other famous or about to be famous people.
richard piper was the perfect
"willie the pimp" in fact, he played willie better than willie
himself!!! i have video of him tumbling all over the stage in an acid-burnout
attack and being helped up and supported by his teenage-prostitute, kate
kendall; a dazzling temptress of stunning beauty; everytime she was on stage
with the band, i played with three drumsticks .... two of them were made with
wood.
i had the chance to meet and film
ex-zappa people like terry bozzio, chad wackerman, steve vai and the ensemble
modern for the tv show and find out a few inside stories and learn a few tricks
on how to play the really tricky stuff. terry bozzio let me put my camera
literally under his armpits while he was showing me some of his licks, some
treasured memories.
we held down a residency at the club
in collingwood for two years; we were filmed by optus vision and paul
grabowsky's "access all areas" (all 45 seconds worth), on the abc;
i've done two ultimate drummers days playing the black page#1 and wrote a
drumset exam syllabus with zappa's music included. craig left mid-'97 and we
managed to find scott real quick and keep on going .......
..... we did ok for playing weird shit.”