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Dweezil Zappa brings his father’s classic ‘Hot Rats’ album to life onstage

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Dweezil Zappa
Photo: Darrole Palmer / Courtesy

Hot Rats has been called the Frank Zappa album for people who don’t actually like Frank Zappa. The composer, bandleader, guitarist and singer spent most his career answering his own question, “Does humor belong in music?” in the affirmative through a catalog loaded with quirky and irreverent tracks. But on his sixth album he got serious, focusing on musicianship and mood on the largely instrumental 1969 project, which he termed a “movie for your ears” in the liner notes.

Hot Rats has also been called the Frank Zappa album for jam band fans, and not just because Phish has been covering leadoff cut “Peaches en Regalia” in concert semi-regularly for more than three decades. Four of the record’s other five songs clock in past the five-minute mark, and several—”Willie the Pimp” (9:21), “Son of Mr. Green Genes” (8:58) and “The Gumbo Variations” (16:55), in particular—feature significant jazz-rock improvisation from a group that included Mothers of Invention holdover Ian Underwood on piano and woodwinds, plus violinists Don “Sugarcane” Harris and Jean-Luc Ponty, bassists Max Bennett and Shuggie Otis, drummers John Guerin, Paul Humphrey and Ron Selico and uncredited second guitarist Lowell George. Oh, and that’s Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, spitting out the menacing, sleazy lyrics to “Willie the Pimp.”

Zappa dedicated the original album, in part, to his then-newborn son Dweezil, so perhaps it’s fitting that, some 26 years after his father’s death at age 52, the 50-year-old Dweezil has taken Hot Rats out for a tour that includes a February 20 stop at Las Vegas’ Brooklyn Bowl. “Everybody seems to have high regard for this album, and I think it comes down to it being something that was different compared to the rest of my dad’s records,” Dweezil recently told Australia’s Musicfeeds.com. “It was the first one that jumped out where he really was featured as a guitar player.”

The shows find Dweezil and his band performing Hot Rats in its entirety, followed by cuts spotlighting—but not limited to—the era in which the album was released. “There’s been some real emphasis on some of the earlier stuff … but we really do just jump around. … We dig through a huge list of 500-600 songs and say, “OK, what do we want to focus on?”

DWEEZIL ZAPPA February 20, 7 p.m., $35-$75. Brooklyn Bowl, 702-862-2695.

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