"I ruined his evening by giving him a load of shit in front of his parents after the concert."

Scott Thunes started playing bass for Zappa in 1981 and was appointed Clonemeister for the 1984 and 1988 tours. He can be seen in the Dub Room Special! (1982), Does Humor Belong In Music? (1985), Video From Hell (1987) and The Torture Never Stops (2008) home videos and heard on numerous albums – including Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch (1982), The Man From Utopia (1983), Them Or Us (1984), Thing-Fish (1984), Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention (1985), Broadway The Hard Way (1988), The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life (1991) and Make A Jazz Noise Here (1991).

Thunes also played with and recorded for Dweezil from 1986 to 1993, on his albums Havin’ A Bad Day (1986, produced by Frank), My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama (1988), Confessions (1991) and Shampoohorn (1993, credited to the band “Z”).

In December 1991, Thunes was part of the ‘rock group’ for the Zappa’s Universe series of concerts at The Ritz in New York, alongside Mike Keneally, Mats Öberg and Morgan Ågren.

Following brief stints with Steve Vai (on the tour supporting his Sex & Religion album), the punk band Fear and The Waterboys, Thunes quit the music business, saying that after Zappa, it had been "one unappreciating employer after another," and worked with a software company for a number of years.

In 2002, he performed with The Lewinskys (his sister Stacy's band) at Zappanale and he has been the special guest of Zappa Plays Zappa a number of times, even playing the whole of its February 2012 US tour (from which Dweezil's F.O.H. III - Out Of Obscurity album is culled).

In 2009, Thunes assisted this writer greatly with my Zappa The Hard Way book, which provides a far better understanding of his part in the demise of Zappa's 1988 band (it wasn't his fault!) During An Audience With Scott Thunes & Jeff Simmons, part of a celebration of Zappa's 70th birthday at London's Roundhouse in 2010, Thunes proudly displayed his copy of the book on the table next to him.

In 2011, Thunes became a member of Californian band The Mother Hips.

In October 2013, Thunes was part of the rock band that performed 200 Motels – The Suites in LA and London (for the London performance, he additionally played the part of ‘Jeff’). A recording of the US production (which featured the Los Angeles Philharmonic) became Official Release No.101, and was issued one month after Gail Zappa passed away.

In May 2017, Thunes left the Mother Hips and was appointed the ‘ScoreMeister’ (curator of Zappa's written music) by the Zappa Trust.

In 2019, he was part of the official Zappa band on the so-called Hologram. Once the tour was done, the band carried on as The Zappa Band, playing at the Baked Potato and supporting King Crimson on their 2021 North American ‘Music Is Our Friend’ tour. They were slated to appear at Zappanale in 2023, but Mike Keneally had other commitments and the band (with Thunes, Ray White, Robert Martin and drummer Joe Travers being replaced by Chad Wackerman) morphed into the Banned From Utopia.

In 2006, a chance meeting with Scott’s actress/singer sister Stacy before Zappa Plays Zappa’s first ever UK show at London’s Royal Albert Hall led to me first contacting him: would he be interested in being interviewed? “Sure thing. I got no problems with the historicals. Lay them on me. But I hope you don't mind if I lie my ass off,” was his response.

This was just before I flew off to Zappanale 17 and I wanted to delay things. But Thunes said, “Gimme something before you go.” So I quickly rattled off a bunch of questions, fully expecting to see his reply on my return – but no, his response was immediate: full of wit, sarcasm and hilarity. He dismissed some of my more inane questions, pointing me in the direction of Thomas Wictor’s excellent book In Cold Sweat: Interviews With Really Scary Musicians. (In the flesh, Thunes is far from scary: warm, sexy, engaging, instantly likeable... the bastard!)

Of course, I wanted to take it further and on my return from Germany, I did. And he came through in spades.

 

Do you have fond memories of Zappa’s Universe?

Wow. That’s interesting. I’ve never been asked that before. Um, yes. And of course, no.

The ‘yes’ is big. Orchestra. Real musicians. Late-night partying that sticks with me to this very day. Being treated like a valued resource by people with far more talent than I will ever have. Have I sucked up enough to orchestral musicians yet?

The ‘no’ is pretty big, too. I had recently written my only composition, a Duo For Violin And Cello that pretty much rocked. I’d brought copies of it for possible classical-musician-performance and I was quite excited. There was a cute blonde violinist who was excited to look at it/perform it, as she’d just started a duo and needed material. I gave her the score.

Later that night, the actual first violinist [Sanford Allen]asked me if I’d let him have a copy of the score as well and I demurred, saying that I was giving ‘first performance’ rights to the person who’d asked first.

Fucking bitch never got back in touch with me and therefore I dropped the chance to have at least one more person look at my music before I lost part of the original score and can’t recreate it because it was in an ancient Macintosh program format. That piece is lost to history because of my short-sightedness. So, that’s bad.

Also and this should sit higher on the list, but one of my favourite moments in rock and a showpiece for me at the concert was ruined by the keyboard player [Marc Ziegenhagen], who forgot to switch the sound on the Minimoog synthesizer (that I used for the bass part on Sofa No.1) from the lead sound he was using on the previous song back to a useful bass tone.

I stood there like a chump on the floor riser in front of hundreds of paying customers for thirty seconds or so twiddling knobs like an amateur as I realized in horror that I was not going to be able to play the Minimoog as I’d done on every single performance of that song since I’d been playing with Frank (not that I’d ever played it before working with him) and I was going to have to jump back on the stage and grab my bass guitar and play it on that, learning the fingerings on the fly and attempting to grab the correct attitude out of the ether while alternately squinting my eyes in furious fuming and glaring at the offending keyboard player who was watching aloft from the wings.

I ruined his evening by giving him a load of shit in front of his parents after the concert.

Other than that: bonus!

You describe yourself as an ex-musician: when was your last gig?

I played several casual gigs this year: last week, I played a wedding with a guitarist friend of mine.

Four months or so back, I played for a medical convention’s End-of-the-Convention Party at AT&T Park in San Francisco. I made a nice chunk of money and wore my suit, played some jazz, some Brazilian music and some surf tunes for three hours, sitting in a metal chair on the VIP level where my friends who have season tickets and worship the Giants have never been.

I felt guilty for not giving a shit.

There were fireworks.

Think you’ll ever play professionally again – what would it take to get you out of your self-imposed exile?

Since we’ve recently experienced my wife getting a raise and our car payments ending, we’ve been doing pretty well. I don’t think there’d be anything that could get me to leave my family for several months at a time. I mean, really: how the fuck is a family supposed to function without one of the members of the Parent Class MIA for long periods of time? I love her too much to leave her or my children for more than a couple of days anyway. She’s always asking me if I need a rest, would I like to go have a beer with the boys, get out of the house for a bit and I always say no. Well, most of the time.

Alternately, the question is kinda loaded. I was never exiled, self-imposed or not. The only reason I was in music is the same reason most musicians are in music: I needed money and I could make some plying my trade, or whoring myself out, whichever you prefer (for those musicians of the world that ‘need’ to make music, please disregard the previous sentence and remain ‘needy’; us listeners thank you).

Once I was unable to make money – for whatever reason – I quit trying to make more money at it.

Are you still composing?

Nope. I haven’t really touched pen to paper since the debacle with the Duo For Violin And Cello. My musical self-directed adventures are limited to a project I’m thinking of where I’ll post songs to one of my web pages that have a limitation of one hour spent on GarageBand.

Other than that, I’m hoping to put something together with my family. My son plays drums (he’s almost five) and my daughter sings something scarily good. I still have plans to teach my wife the bass (it doesn’t take much to be a bass player in a rock band, that we all know) and I’ll play guitar or keys or accordion.

But the most important thing is, I’ll finally be in a band with some friends instead of an orchestral hired-hand like every other band I’ve ever been in, professionally-speaking.

When I spoke with Ed Mann, he said he finally was able to appreciate your unique sense of humour and “would welcome the opportunity to play with you anytime.” What are the chances?

Well, pretty damn high, considering. I mean, playing with Ed wouldn’t even remotely ‘bring up’ any bad feelings from him specifically, if that’s what you mean.

Ed and I are thoroughly reconciled.

Was it your idea to bung a bit of Bartók into Packard Goose on the 88 tour?

Nope. Frank’s. He asked me to orchestrate it – and the Stravinsky – for the band. He tweezed it a bit, so it’s not ‘reeeely’ all mine, but I take credit for it because he stole credit for the music for Promiscuous, as bad as it is.

Your audition piece for Frank was Mo N Herb’s Vacation – did you ever record that (or Mo’s Vacation) for him?

Nope. We were going to do a rock-band/orchestral concert in Poland that would have contained that piece, among others, while in rehearsal for the 1982 tour, but it never materialized. All the pieces I worked on during my audition phase were looked at for possible performance but the project was scrapped.

I recorded three songs with Frank in the studio: Cocaine Decisions, Valley Girl, and Be In My Video. Every other single piece of bass performance came from live recordings, either raw or tweezed/massaged in the studio.

What do you know about the song Solitude that Frank wrote for Gail?

I’m sorry you brought that up. Sadness.

I recorded many, many tapes during the rehearsal phase of 1981. Most of these are lost from lendings or movings. The tape that contained the sole performance of that song was given to Steve Vai as a Zappa-Band-Member to Zappa-Band-Member Temporary InterLibrary Loan.

Fucker lost it.

I would appreciate it if he’d send that baby home to me. Other than that, it was an incredible song and I was looking mighty forward to performing it for the rest of my time with Frank. ‘Twas not to be.

Damn.

Arthur Barrow was still Clonemeister after you joined Frank. Did he give you any particular advice that stuck with you as regards playing bass for Frank?

Nope. In one ear and out the other was all the information I received from old Arty. He wasn’t very one-to-one, if that’s what you mean. He was nice enough during the initial putting-together-of-the-band and all, but he and I are not what you’d call compatible.

I do recall one item though. We were a Nike endorsement band for the Eighties and we’d have to go to Santa Monica to get shoes at the Public Interface where we’d be given two pairs of shoes for each tour. Once, during the 1982 rehearsals, Arty came with us to get his shoes and I arrived wearing my Converse High Tops. When they only gave me one pair in revenge for wearing another brand’s shoes, Arty was there at Nike’s defence, asking me why I thought they should honour their end of the bargain if I wasn’t honouring mine.

Nice guy!

What can you tell me about the session with Lisa Popeil?

You mean the original meeting? Or the week she was a fully-fledged member of the ensemble before Frank had to fire her because it was painfully obvious that she was unable to deal with the real-music elements of a rock-band’s particulars?

Or the time we were in the bathroom together, making out? I don’t recall much about that particular time, so I was glad she mentioned it in song.

I fondly recall her soft smooth skin and her bounteous breasts and her obvious sexual passion, but I’m a gentleman and she’s a lady and we don’t talk about such things.

Also, I can’t mention what Frank told me about her without her permission, so that will probably stay hidden until after her death.

I love her. She’s a sweetie.

Do you think you’ve mellowed to the point where you wouldn’t now put on headphones and do a crossword puzzle on stage during a drum/guitar duet?

I deny categorically your definition. It was stage-craft, improvised around the idea of a non-rock situation where all elements of stage-craft are considered equal.

It wasn’t until after the tour ended that I ever heard anything at all about that particular element of the ‘show’. My understanding of our situation was that rock posturing is stupid and bands that participate in such behaviour are pathetically under-brained and deserve ridicule.

You’re talking about the European Dweezil tour of 1993 where I was already quite bent out of shape for having to deal with the idiocy of one of my band members on a daily basis and was in no mood to be told what to do, what to think, or anything at all other than “You’re great. I like what you do with my songs and have for almost eight years and I won’t let the simple complication of not having had the good fortune to tour with our first choice for that position (due to medical issues), so if there’s any bad blood about this, I’ll just jettison the offending party.”

Instead, I was ejected – thank you, Lord! – rather than the truly ‘difficult’ member (the person who was new, who was not part of the ‘original crew’, who was not of a sufficiently intelligent nature and therefore didn’t ‘fit in’ as I saw it). I found that our original conception of the band – that we were the ‘Anti-Rock’ band and our job was to show up rock stage conventions (rock ‘face’, stances, attitudes and positions, grimaces, head-banging, hair-throwing) for the farce that they were – changed during our time on the road and so my previously non-offensive, part-of-the-proceedings “schtick” stuck out like a sore thumb due to a conflict with Dweezil’s apparent search for ‘seriousness’.

Never in a million years could I have imagined that he would have switched over to a place in his mind where what we had all previously imagined and unwritteningly decided was thrown away to make way for his ‘music’ and that the proper stance for listening was pure concentration.

I did what I did because I thought it was funny, not because I thought it would hurt him.

Story of my life, apparently.

The story about sticking you cock in Bruce Fowler’s face to shut him up – true or false?

Super-duper true. Double true, dat.

On a scale of one to 26, just how scary do you think you are?

One.

Did your brother Derek ever try again to get into Frank’s band after you’d joined?

Nope. He concentrated on parking cars (like I had) and composition (like I wished I had). Then he got in a very bad motorcycle accident that eventually killed him (complications from AIDS).

You said the Vai tour was “hellish” – what was so bad about it?

Pass. I am keeping these things to myself. He’s a nice guy, I’ve heard. I have no urge to dispel that myth.

Is Tommy Mars really an alien?

He’s a nice guy. I love him. Wished things went better between us, but personalities are what they are.

Musically, he’s the most advanced individual I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with. I wish him double-happiness for the rest of his life.

What memories do you have of Napoleon Murphy Brock on the 1984 tour?

He was great. I loved the way he stayed in bed ‘til it was time to leave for our first gig in San Diego – a three-hour drive away – without even remotely getting his room ready to leave.

We out-of-towners – me, Ray White, Napi – were put up at a residency apartment in the San Fernando Valley. Kitchen – utensils and plates – that type of thing. We were there for about three month’s worth of rehearsals and so we were very much ‘living’ there.

Napi’s room was a fucking mess. We were due to leave at – oh, say, noon – and I went to go get him and, bless his heart, he was lying there asleep or something. I went in to wrangle him and it was obvious that he wasn’t planning on driving with us in the van, but intended to use his own very large old-school boat of an American car to drive himself.

Mistake number one.

He very seriously completely missed the entire first sound check. This is a serious no-no and I only did it once in the seven years I played with Frank and that was for a pretty serious reason – I’d lost my passport – and Frank had even threatened to fine me for it. I told him to go ahead, I couldn’t help it. So whatever, dood. He didn’t.

So for Napi to whip that out at the beginning of the tour was pretty righteous.

The next two weeks were repeats of this type of thing. After a while, Frank just figured he was too high to proceed. I have no idea if drugs were involved – I’m just guessing – but you’d have to have a serious priority-issue if you thought that what you were doing was more important than what Frank needed you to do.

I wish he’d stayed.

Do you think Frank put out too much stuff from the 1984 tour – for example, on the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series – simply because it was well recorded?

Frank liked clean sounds, tight bands and no mistakes. I don’t really care for that stuff all that much so I am not really able to gauge his recordings using those criteria.

I liked the dangerous elements of the 1988 tour, where one didn’t know if one was going to hear a gigantic fucking-up right after a righteous exaltedness or what.

When I interviewed Joe Travers about your departure from “Z”, he said you had problems with him. “He has problems with a lot of people. He had been working with Dweezil for a long time. It just ran its course pretty much. You should ask Scott.” So?

Sounds pretty damn good to me. Good on ya, mate! Okay, whatever.

I offered to perform fisticuffs upon Joe’s person for throwing drumsticks into the audience after telling him repeatedly that this was not a good thing as people have a propensity to throw things back.

Sure, a Joe Travers drumstick is something that most people would fetish like a… well, a fetish. But, like they say in Men In Black: “A person is smart, but people are dumb.” Throw something broken with splinters sticking out of it into a post-rock concert crowd and you’ll watch me cower in abject fear.

Joe not only couldn’t ‘get’ it, but argued with me all the way down the stairs into the backstage area. Mike Keneally was with me so he’ll corroborate. I kept on Joe until I was nearly apoplectic. He never backed down, bless his pointed little heart, but it just inflamed me all the more.

I apologised, but I got no joy back. He said: “I accept your apology, but I’ll never forgive you.” Whoa. Cut off, dood.

When I got home from auditioning with the Waterboys in New York after the tour was over, I got a call from Dweezil, firing me. He said he needed ‘nice’ people in his band because he couldn’t afford to have separate rooms for each of his band members (even though he flew First Class all the time and stayed in Four Star hotels wherever we went).

You see, we alternated sharing rooms and, after the argument with Joe, we got to stay by ourselves (something band-leaders should take into account when booking tours). Sure, most bands use a single van as their hotel, but how many Zappa-quality musicians would do a van tour of the US?

Oh yeah, that’s right: Me.

It was great to go back to having separate rooms for the remainder of the tour, but it wasn’t enough to resolve my issues with Joe.

How would you rate Dweezil as a musician/composer? Were song ideas with “Z” greatly influenced by you and/or Keneally?

I absolutely loved playing with Dweezil specifically because of his thoroughly fecund musical imagination. For a year and a half, Josh Freese and I would rehearse the shit out of Dweezil’s bedroom noodlings and turn them into nuggets of pure golden ambrosia.

Those few months really were part of the reason I remained mostly unfazed by my lack of financial success and Other-Than-Zappa musical possibilities, keeping me happily sucking at the teat (or, more to the point, shooting up the China White) of the Zappa Family instead of getting off my ass and getting a job, as they say. I really shoulda, coulda been a contender if it weren’t for them Damn Zappas and their Damn Music (this is a joke).

Ahmet seems very unlike Dweezil; extroverted and extremely funny. I imagine you two got on like a house on fire? Miss him?

I love Ahmet to death. He was very much a Zappa the entire time I knew him, so he was funny yet distant. He wanted nothing more than to have fun and laugh with his older brother, but other humans amused him at times.

He and I shared hardly anything in common but we respected each other. The one time I tried to turn him on to some art was going up to his bedroom and trying to play him Plan 9 From Outer Space.

He got bored rather quickly. But he was in his early teens so I couldn't have expected too much... he was addicted to comics right then.

Do you have any contact with the Zappas these days?

Not really. A couple of years back, I got a phone call from Gail (my phone number hasn’t changed since I moved up from LA eleven years ago) asking me if I’d like to be involved in Zappaween. I said yes and got a phone call directly from the biggest music promoter in New York, Ron Delsener. Pretty dramatic.

A contract was sent a few weeks later with terms that confused me, so I got in touch with Steve Vai to ask him if he had the same terms. He did, but he felt that it would have been okay with him if the terms were changed on my account, seeing as I didn’t have millions of dollars in the bank and I lived hand-to-mouth at the time.

After that particular conversation, without hearing anything from Gail about anything, I read in the alt.fan.frank-zappa newsgroup that the gig had been cancelled. Gail never called me back.

I went to see Zappa Plays Zappa last month and had a nice conversation with everybody there, including Dweezil (he was about to have a baby); Gail (like I’d never left her house, old friends); Joe Travers (told him good tourist destinations for him and his girlfriend – yes, we were on good terms); Steve Vai (he wanted me to know that he’d finally become a fan of the music of Gustav Mahler, twenty-five years after I tried to turn him and everybody else on the 1981 tour on to him); Terry Bozzio (who – not having ever particularly gotten along with him [understatement for dramatic purposes] I was not expecting to even make eye contact with, let alone have him come up and grab my arms in your standard male side hug, like in a photograph you’d take with a fan – was smiling and goofy and made a comment to the assembled hero-worshipping band members [who probably thought there would be a fight] that made light of our previous meeting; I appreciated this); and Warren DeMartini, the ex-guitarist from RATT, an old friend.

Did you enjoy the show?

I did! They – the musicians on hire – comported themselves admirably. Had to take a couple of pee breaks so I unfortunately missed the drum solo section and one other part that I can’t remember. Other than that, they rocked the world.

Do you still have any contact with Mike Keneally or Ike Willis?

Strangely enough, Mike never calls when he comes up to Northern California and plays with whoever he plays with, but I enjoyed our time together in Germany for Zappanale 13.

I tried to get up to see him the last time he was here, but there was a mismanagement of time on my part and I missed him.

Ike? Uh, no. I’m not interested too much in communicating with him. I’m still recuperating from having spent six or eight months of my life in close proximity to him back in 1988. He still owes me $95.

But more importantly, I have hard feelings concerning an interview he did with JamBands.com where he thoroughly put the blame of the entire 1988 debacle on my shoulders, completely destroying – for the audience of that interview and any and all future historians who might read the damn thing – any semblance of a balanced viewpoint concerning the proceedings of that time.

The main impetus for me to get ‘online’ back in 1997 was to battle the conception of the times: that I was at fault, that I was a bad bass player, that I ruined the tour and even worse, Frank’s music with… well, with myself.

I’d spent the better part of a year writing my Once-Asked-Questions on Geoscott.com and going on the above-mentioned newsgroup to rehabilitate my history. Ike comes along and without even attempting to communicate with me, like Ed Mann did (Ed, being the original instigator of a large percentage of the negativity surrounding ‘me’ during the 1988 tour, has since not only apologised to me – and would also apologise to Frank were he alive – but has gone on to be one of my more trusted and simpatico cyber-buddies) lays the entire negativity of the tour on my doorstep, as if he’d never talked to any single member of the touring ensemble after the tour was over to find out the truth, but only read some blatherings on some chat room wall about what happened.

I’m happy for him and glad that he’s got a career singing music, but I’ve only seen him at the Zappanale – where, yes, I was gracious and reasonable to him.

I was told that he moved to my locale and I was shocked and dismayed. I am under the impression that he leaves disasters in his wake so I thought that his injection into my area would be a ‘bad thing’ but it seems that he’s already left without any damage to me, my family, my reputation, or my friends’ businesses.

I wish him luck in all his endeavours.

How did the invitation to play at Zappanale 13 come about?

My sister Stacy met the guy who puts it on. He asked her what I was doing and she had a brainstorm that we should perform live on stage for the very first time in our forties after never having any previous artistic combinatorality.

I jumped at the chance.

Of course, free airfare, a week in Germany with some Euros in my pocket, time spent with Stacy and my niece Isabella and a thousand Euros helped me to agree to leave my ‘self-imposed exile’ from music.

When did you last cry and why?

My wife and I cry at store openings. Probably some ad in a magazine or commercial that I thought was done with such genius and attention to human needs for art and loving communication (while not insulting the audience’s intelligence) that causes me a deep emotional reaction. We do that constantly. I’ll find something, or she’ll find something and we’ll show it to each other and as one or the other looks up at the other, we’ll have this look on our faces, like: “AWWWWW”…but with a ‘isn’t that sweet but totally correct and intelligent and not at all tasteless or base or bathetic or twee’ type of attention to basic humanity.

Other than that, I think it was a recent communication from a friend who was very eloquent about a difficult situation.

How does your wife put up with you?

I’m going to take the high road here and assume you mean, ‘What does my wife think of me in general,’ because there’s nothing even remotely special about how difficult I am to live with. I don’t gamble, I don’t steal her money, I don’t carouse around with other women (although the thought has crossed my mind) and I don’t drink to excess – in fact, I quit drinking my beloved beer at the start of the Summer because of my encroaching belly.

I am lazy and distracted and can’t complete projects and I’m not a house cleaner and the basement and the backyard are conceptually messy, but no more so than most.

I love my wife to distraction and find her funny, sexy, beautiful and adorable.

I’m a sporadic cook and only know three things to do but when I do them, they’re very edible and I get high marks from the family (along with cleaned dishes).

I have a quick temper and I hate people in general. I’ve scared my wife with my outbursts at people on the street while driving (I think it’s comedy and I’m only pretending to be mad at them, it being a parody of people who yell at people in cars, but she doesn’t get it) and constantly make jokes that go awry.

I lose friends more than I make them from my snappy rejoinders and what I think is funny gives most people I know the Howling Fantods, but I’m always up for a barbeque at my house and we have regular outings with friends so there’s always somebody with us who loves the family.

I’m a great host, always making sure people are well supplied with libations or what-have-you, but when they leave, I heave a sigh of relief.

I am always hugging or kissing my wife and I tell her I love her at least twenty thousand times a day, which isn’t nearly enough for her, which rocks. We communicate about our day and about our thoughts concerning the world, but our innermost thoughts are rather guarded, being too dangerous to let loose regularly. Our subsequent conversations about the dangerous stuff are gentle and informative and we always leave them satisfied.

We’ve never been mad at one another for more than a few hours and when my wife was disappointed at me for a long-term disaster I purveyed unto her she was extremely understanding (finally) of my lacks instead of pointedly making me out to be a ‘bad person’ or what-have-you.

I’m working on losing weight and have dropped 15lbs in the past three months. I keep to one or two espresso drinks a day and since we got an espresso machine I save my wife billions of dollars by not going to the coffee shop in San Anselmo every single day.

I don’t ask for high-end computer or musical equipment (although I’d really like a dedicated room for my recording junk that I can actually use and enough electrical outlets to run them) all that much, but she’s just gotten me a used piano and a brand new acoustic guitar, so she’s obviously aware of my leanings, but she never gives me grief for my time spent with music (probably because it’s so sporadic and seldom) as another woman might – and they have, let me tell you, they have in the past – and I’ve made her cry with my talents in this area so I’ve still ‘got it.’

I don’t like to repeat myself, I don’t like to tell my children to do something more than fifty times so I get cranky when I do and I hate it when people give me ‘the cheek’ instead of the lips for me to kiss. Especially if I’ve known them for years. I know people who don’t give me the cheek and they’re hotter Betties than the cheek-givers, so what’s the deal?

Idiots.

I get cranky when people are mean to my wife, or when other children don’t give my children the social respect they’ve earned and deserve, so I’ve been known to overstep my boundaries and give younger people grief when they are obviously incapable of handling my vitriol, but I always apologise afterwards.

I’m an excellent apologist and am extremely well-practiced at it.

I am hyper-aware of my failings so I’m always ready to hear criticism, but since most people are incapable of seeing the correct end of a diatribe (this is sometimes evidenced by unmeasured responses to perceived injustices; this happens to me a lot because of my past; they just can’t seem to get over it), they think I’m getting mad at the criticism instead of the manner in which it’s being conveyed.

In other words, I’m exactly like other men, except better. So she knows she’s got a good thing.

You seem a very happy and contented family guy. Do you ever worry about the time when your kids are less dependant on you?

Absolutely. I know it’s kinda creepy – hopefully she’ll remember this in her future, with fondness – but I tell my daughter to never leave me and to not grow up and all that jazz.

They are seriously the most adorable things on planet earth and I’ll miss them horribly when they go (even though I’m sure I’ll be as ready to see them ejected from the pod as they’ll be to be ejected) but when you think about it, my daughter at age six is one third of the way to college. One third! It’s disgusting to contemplate so I reject the notion that they’ll leave me.

Ever dream about spoons?

Not recently. But I do dream about Frank and that’s far more disturbing. I dream about being on tour with him and it’s always great. I’m always excited to be about to play and it’s mostly backstage stuff at outdoor concerts, as that was my favourite place to be while on tour. Grass, tents, amphitheatres, all the people, the girls, the beer and sky and the sound of PAs pumping out pre-concert music or the music of others.

These are what make up the majority of my pleasant memories of touring so they find themselves inside my dreams of Frank.

What do you miss most about him?

His voice. Talking to him. Listening to him pontificate about every little thing on the planet that not only was interesting to him but to whoever asked him a question. He was the most generous genius I’d ever met, who’d give any moron the time of day and would explain in gracious languor and excruciating detail elements of an idea, thought, situation or position to anybody who asked.

If he had the time.

On tour buses, he had time.

How would you like to be remembered?

As a good father, a good husband and a good bass player.

My sense of humour, my giant wangus and my attention to the clitoris.

For being Frank’s longest-concurrently-tenured musician.

For having that fist fight in Wales during the Vai tour with that guy who crashed the backstage area drunk and waved that chicken wing at this cute vegetarian girl who I was not hitting on but I felt protective of.

For my string bass part on the Waterboys’ Love And Death.

For having played string bass in a staged performance of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire Du Soldat in San Anselmo – my crush, Sarah Fairchild, in attendance.

For being even remotely associated with Derek Thunes’ music by conducting the only performance of his Fantasy For Electric Violin And Jazz Band at the age of 17.

For not being the reason many people were unable to attend any concerts by the 1988 Frank Zappa band. Wasn’t my fault, people! Impetus or no!

 

Interview conducted on Tuesday 8th August 2006. The complete interview can be found in my book Frank Talk: The Inside Stories Of Zappa’s Other People (Wymer UK, 2017). Photo of Scott with the Idiot Bastard taken by John Campbell at London’s Roundhouse in November 2010.

"Dweezil sounded exactly the same as he did when he called me to fire me. It was very disarming and very charming. It was the longest conversation I’ve had with him in years."

I continued to correspond with Thunes after our first interview and more so since his invaluable help on Zappa The Hard Way.

I got an excuse to chat with him some more when he was drafted into Zappa Plays Zappa by Dweezil for their US tour of February 2012. Scott Parker was interviewing Dweezil himself for Episode 6 of the ZappaCast, so I asked Thunes to talk about his involvement in the tour – and much more besides.

 

Can you give us your thoughts on Zappa Plays Zappa.

My thoughts on Zappa Plays Zappa? Hmmm.

At this point, all I’m doing is working on the songs – I’ve got a list of the songs here, there’s about twenty-three of them. I have made charts for all of the sixties stuff, that I have been listening to my entire life but never actually had to play. Most of the stuff I have played with Frank during the '88 tour, but there’s a bunch of stuff from Freak Out! that I’ve never played. Even though one of the first albums that I ever bought was We’re Only In It For The Money, I have never actually had to play Mother People, or Flower Punk obviously – nobody ever plays Flower Punk.

The Muffin Men did!

It’s really nice to have a chance to delve deep into these songs and I’ve always loved Roy Estrada merely because he was in the band, but I never actually realised how good he was and what magic he brought to the simple parts. I always considered him ‘the first bass player’, so I never really cared whether or not he was good, but the fact is he is a perfect foil for these songs – his tone, I love listening to him play. It’s absolutely hilarious delving deep into the songs and finding the magic in his playing.

I was listening to Lumpy Money earlier today and the instrumental versions of the earlier songs are really interesting. Like you say, when you first listen to some of that stuff you don’t really appreciate quite how much is going on.

Yeah, we don’t actually get that much instrumental work. Frank likes to put crap on top of things. So as soon as you get into something that feels really good, he either switches gears on you or puts a snork in. Or, like he does in The Idiot Bastard Son, he does a bunch of crazy hippies talking nonsense in the studio. Which is really great when you’re a twelve year old kid and you’ve been listening to pop music and you don’t know what music is. To hear sound being used musically – I played it for the kids in the car this morning and tried to blow their minds, but it’s not having the same effect that it did on me for some reason.

So what instruments do you play, Scott – apart from bass, obviously. You can write music, you can read music. But do you actually play other instruments?

I have been playing the guitar for quite some time. When I moved to New York after the 1984 tour, I moved in with my girlfriend, I brought a guitar with me and I had to do a lot of four-track recording for myself. I brought this guitar that I had bought a long time ago along with me. I think of myself as a bass player who plays a guitar. But with GarageBand and with the effects that are built in, anybody can sound like any guitarist they want. I’m a really good GarageBand guitar player. I consider myself a guitarist, without portfolio.

I played guitar in a punk band a long time ago. I love playing the guitar. I love bending notes. I love distorted, crunchy rock guitar. But I don’t have a chance to play with anybody. Nobody will hire me as a guitar player. I can’t play those normal guitar riffs that everybody plays.

I play piano. I sit around and I play my Brahms. I play my Bartók. I try and go through as much as I can. I’m a really crappy good pianist, or a really good crappy pianist. I’m about the same level on the guitar and the piano. I really enjoy playing them both.

If you tell me to play something, I could probably get it down but I wouldn’t call myself a guitar player or keyboard player. But I have done both in the studio and I really enjoy it a lot.

So when did you get the call from Dweezil to join the West Coast tour?

I was at my final dress rehearsal for The Nutcracker that was done by my son’s ballet school. For the past five years, I have been in the production on stage being what they call a party parent. I was hanging around in the back room, getting dressed – there was about eight of us, all getting dressed and ready to put on our finery to get on stage. I was telling two of the people my musical life story. I was basically telling them how I had worked with Frank, how I had worked with Dweezil, how I’d just gotten fired by Dweezil and the phone rang and it said blocked call. I said to them, “I bet this is Dweezil.” I answered the phone and it was Dweezil!

Very, very odd. Wasn’t expecting to hear from him because I had just played with Mike Keneally in San Diego, I had invited him to sit in with my band The Mother Hips. We played down at his local club that he has been playing at since he was a kid – the Belly Up. He jammed with us. We had a wonderful time. He really played well. I got him to come up to play on even more songs, coz I really loved what he was doing, he really enjoyed what he was doing. He had a great time and backstage at one point he told me that Pete Griffin was probably not going to be in ZPZ much longer. So I hoped that I would get a call from Dweezil, but I didn’t expect it. So the fact that it happened within a month was strange, odd and fun.

The conversation was awesome. He sounded exactly the same as he did when he called me to fire me. He had the same hesitant, kind of ‘I’m adorable, I really don’t know how to have this particular conversation with you’ kind of effect. It was very disarming and very charming. It was really fun to talk with him. It was the longest conversation I’ve had with him in years.

He explained a bunch of the band politics. I explained what my situation was: my band was going on hiatus for two months, I had an empty spot. I would love to do it, thank you very much. It was awesome.

It’s interesting, because we interviewed Dweezil for the ZappaCast last week and I interviewed him in 1991 and when I listen to both recordings he doesn’t seem to have changed at all.

No. He may be 42, but he still seems like the 12 year old kid he was when I met him.

It’s interesting that you say Mike Keneally was in the know, because I’m never quite sure what the relationship is between Dweezil and Mike these days. Because they fell out years ago...

Mike knows everybody. Mike is the nicest guy on the face of the planet. He’s the best musician, blah-blah-blah. Everybody knows him. Everybody loves him and everybody wants a piece of him. But he just as much gets a piece of everybody else, just by being open like that.

He is best friends with Joe Travers. Joe Travers is his drummer. Bryan Beller is Keneally’s bass player. It’s not even incestuous. When Mike Keneally and Bryan Beller got fired, Joe Travers didn’t. Joe Travers was employed by the family, so there was no reason to get rid of him.

So there’s never been a separation – there’s a direct connection between Mike Keneally and anything that happens up at the Zappa house. Even though there’s a wall there. He’s on the other side of the wall.

I can talk to Gail whenever I want. But there’s no reason to, so I don’t. But he talks to Joe probably ten times a day.

When we spoke to Dweezil for the ZappaCast, he was saying he was a bit disillusioned with the alumni. But he said that he was looking forward to you joining them because of your enthusiasm.

Really? Well, that’s nice to know! Every once in a while, you stand on stage – and I did this a lot in 1988 – and you say, “What’s my job? My job is to play the bass.” I’ve never wanted to just play the bass. So there’s a disconnect between what I expect from myself, what I offer to people and what they accept from me. Quite often, that disconnect is terminal. Sometimes it’s funny.

I’m having the same problem with my current band, The Mother Hips. I have to decide whether I’m going to act like the employee that I still am – because I’m still not a member of the band, I’m still a salaried employee. I have to decide how much I’m going to give. I get on stage and then I forget that I ever had a conversation with myself and Scott Thunes does what he has to do. I think that’s probably the best thing for everybody, because it’s nice when I shut up.

[laughs] Well, I enjoyed it when you stepped up on stage at the Roundhouse with ZPZ – you upped the ante.

Thanks.

After my book came out, I was approached by Frank’s guityar tech on the 1988 tour – Merl Saunders Jr., who’s still in contact with you?

Yes, sir. I see him in town all the time. We both live in San Rafael. In fact, I saw him while I was leaving a restaurant with my son about a month and a half ago. I saw him on the street in San Rafael right in front of a club that he’s about to open in our fair city. He’s got big plans for starting this project. I’m very happy to know him, be his friend and I’m very proud of him for starting this thing.

Another guy who contacted me was Eric Buxton – I thought we’d lost him, as I couldn’t trace him at all during the writing of the book. You knew Eric before, didn’t you?

No. Only from the tour. He was part of the gang and that was really awesome. Power to him. But I was busy with Dot Stein. Most of the time. As much as I possibly could be.

She’s talking about going to Zappanale. I don’t know if she will.

She hasn’t mentioned it to me. That’s extremely good news. I would love to see her there. In fact, she invited my wife... when I went to New York the last time with The Mother Hips, I called her up, tried to get to see her, but she’d just left town. She does that all the time, it’s impossible to get hold of her. She just a month ago invited us to stay at her place if we ever go back, so I’m hoping that will happen but I’ll probably see her at Zappanale before we get back to New York.

She used to split her time between New York and Berlin.

That’s where I saw her last, years and years ago.

You were recently involved in a documentary about Jaco Pastorius?

Yes. I have not heard anything officially since then. Strangely enough, Robert Trujillo, who is spearheading the project, he and his wife are building a house in Los Angeles. But he still comes up here to rehearse with Metallica and he was with his trainer running in a hilly area that my wife likes to go and run at. So they met each other in a parking lot and he had told her that the footage he got from me was absolutely superb, he’s extremely pleased I don’t want to say anything more about how gushingly awesome he thought it was, but he was very, very pleased and as far as I know it’s still moving on. I’m sure he’s very busy with Metallica, so the director’s probably doing what he needs to do and hopefully we’ll see something soon.

And you got to touch the Bass of Doom, didn’t you?

I got to play... I actually had practiced Donna Lee a little bit beforehand because it was the one thing bass players all did. So I was able to play Donna Lee on Jaco’s bass. It was definitely a coming home moment for me. That was 1976 or '77, so I was 16 or 17 when we were all learning that. That was taking it way back; I got to play a piece of his on the bass.

In fact my bro, who was a composer before he died, one of the first big pieces he did was a string quartet. It was five movements, all jazz based and the first movement was basically variations on Donna Lee. In fact, it’s called Variations On Donna Lee, so we were all infected with that piece of music. It was very strange.

I wanted to play the bass around that time, too. I was listening to Jaco and Stanley Clarke and all those people. But I got frustrated because I couldn’t play like them overnight, so I gave up.

The way to do it is to not try and copy those assholes.

[laughs] Yeah, I guess so.

That’s the way you do it. You just do what you do and go, “Oh wow! That’s really awesome.”

But I never perfected Donna Lee. We all thumbed our way through it. The idea of trying it was fun. But virtually the only other thing of Jaco’s that I’ve tried to play was – I don’t think it was Teen Town, but Punk Jazz maybe. Whatever. It was one other piece of his that I tried to play and I still to this day cannot play it. I don’t kick myself for it. But it does help me to realise what my strengths are. One of them was to not ever be a Jaco clone. That actually is a very nice thing to know.

There’s talk of a possible Roundhouse 2 event this year. Are you aware of that?

I am not. Nobody’s told me anything, but I’m sure that when I get down to Los Angeles, Gail will tell me everything. I have emailed her and she has not responded. So I don’t know if she’s busy, or if she doesn’t do email anymore. Or if she’s mad at me - you never can tell.

So I am very happy to hear that. I would go and do the Roundhouse thing every year. I would move to London. I would clean their toilets for them to be able to hang out at the Roundhouse. It’s an absolutely awesome venue, everybody there was completely beautiful and just one of the finest times of me and my wife’s lives. My wife’s Facebook profile picture is still to this day her standing there with... God, I can’t remember his name, because I’m an idiot, but Vince Noir.

Noel Fielding!

A very happy moment for everybody, I can’t wait to do it again and I hope I’m asked. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Maybe they’re bored of me. I still have a lot of stuff to say. I think.

You mentioned Gail. I know what she was doing yesterday! A friend of mine, Mick Ekers, he’s writing a book about Zappa’s gear. He’s friendly with Thomas Nordegg and he managed to get himself an invite to the house to photograph Frank’s surviving equipment.

That is awesome. The only piece of equipment that I care about is the Minimoog that I used to play with Frank. I’m sure it’s gone. I’m sure she got rid of it. But that was, out of all the things there, that was the only thing I cared about. I really would have loved to get my hands on that. Or his Bösendorfer. I asked her to give me the Bösendorfer at least ten times, but she keeps on saying “No!”

I wonder why?!

Yeah, Unbelievable.

Any tales to relay about any of Frank’s gear?

I don’t have much in the way of stories or anecdotes. I only know that it was really nice to have that, because I always wanted a Minimoog, then when Frank said, “I want you to play it,” it was a wonderful day. I never really was able to spend time learning the sound-making process: I got Tommy Mars to give me a nice big fat bass tone and that was the one I lived with. I was never really a sophisticated Minimoog player. I did enjoy my time with it.

But other than that, the only other real piece of equipment of Frank’s that took mind share was Tommy Mars’ Yamaha synthesizer. That was my least favourite instrument that was ever created. I really have always hated what that sound did to Frank’s music. Because Tommy was an organist and he did this thing with it that I read a quote about Keith Emerson, where the synthesizer for him was just always a super-charged organ.

That’s kinda the same thing I always got from Tommy Mars with this Yamaha keyboard. It was one of the first multi-phonic synthesizers that you could play more than one note on and it had this blast patch that you know he used on everything. I just really hate that sound. Hate it, hate it, hate it. It really infested and infused that period for me. I could never understand why such a wonderful musician would love to make that sound on purpose and do it all the time on every song.

But that’s just me.

 

Interview conducted on Wednesday 25th January 2012. The complete interview can be found in my book Frank Talk: The Inside Stories Of Zappa’s Other People (Wymer UK, 2017). Caricature of Scott by Antero Valério.

"No itinerary for the cancelled 1988 dates was ever presented. I always thought he was lying just to make us feel worser. Not me! I didn’t do nothin’!"