Dweezil Zappa has played some weird-ass electric guitars in his time. He’s had Gibson’s master luthier Jim DeCola build him a meticulous replica of his father’s Hot Rats Les Paul – and requested subsequent modifications.
He has owned a stereo Ripley guitar that came with a rack-mounted “brain” that allowed him to pan each string to wherever. This thing was super rare. Ry Cooder had one. Eddie Van Halen had one. It blew EVH’s mind. He called it ‘the Super Pluto Guitar.’
Zappa has had Madonna painted on a Jackson guitar in the hope that she would hire him like Michael Jackson hired Eddie Van Halen, and if that ultimately didn’t work out, at least he had the moxie to get her to sign it, too. And let’s not forget his one-of-one fretless Gibson SG.
Even his signature guitar, a bespoke/boutique take on the Shabat Lynx S-style is pure outer-limits, so with all that in mind, of course Zappa took it in his stride when Ernest Packaging booked him for its latest Cardboard Sessions, rocking up at his Hikari Studios, Los Angeles, with a truck full of cardboard gear, and turning over these upcycled Stratocaster and Telecasters and Precision Bass guitars to let Zappa and his band cook.
“Trouble will be had. Look at this thing,” says Zappa as he and the band take cardboard instruments out of the cases. “It’s insane… If you hold it up to the light you can see through it”
The result was Man Your Stations, and as Zappa explains, it was written especially for the session, and involved working out how they could use these instruments without disturbing the carefully arranged mise en place of a band whose rehearsals are heating up ahead of a tour.
“The thing that’s fun about it is that the piece of music was constructed in a way to purposely have people moving in the room past microphones and changing positions and that’s why I ended up calling it Man Your Stations,” says Zappa. “We were able to have instruments that were already in the room, because we were getting ready to go on tour, and we didn’t want to break down our rehearsal setup, so we wanted to use everything that was in the room.
“It was a ton of instruments all over the place, plus the cardboard instruments and then it was ‘Okay, go over there!’ without having to say anything, we incorporated it into the whole song.”
Cardboard Chaos is the name of the company Ernest Packaging collaborated with to make these custom instruments, and there was some nominative determinism at play there with cardboard chaos playing out on the floor of the studio.
It’s as if your head is right at the source and you’re hearing all around, affecting you on a sensory level you wouldn’t get otherwise
“A couple of people moved to different places to end up on drums, one guy started on guitar, and another started on keyboard, but they went to different drum sets,” says Zappa. “Everything is around that feature set. The cardboard instruments were our focus, but we have these satellite elements that were incorporated.”
When it all came together, was performed live, tracked and in the can, Zappa gave it the Dolby Atmos treatment. The Cardboard Sessions have featured the likes of ZZ Top, Marcus King, J Mascis, Robby Krieger and more. But Zappa made a little bit of history with his. It was the first to be mixed in Atmos.
“It’s as if your head is right at the source and you’re hearing all around, affecting you on a sensory level you wouldn’t get otherwise,” says Zappa. Check it out above. Atmos headphones advised. Have fun in all three dimensions. Keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times.
Earlier this year, Dweezil Zappa pitted analog gear against its digital counterparts, playing Eruption to see if listeners could truly tell the difference between the two.
