July 17, 2003 - 10:37 a.m.

Last July Candy Zappa, John Tabacco, and I, along with a few other musical miscreants, went to the former East Germany to perform at the 13th annual Zappanale festival. When the gig originally came up John and I didn't really have a band, so we hastily impressed members of Ed Palermo's big band, with whom Candy, John, and I had appeared (Candy and John both sang with Ed on an regularly irregular basis) and proceeded to throw ourselves into three months' worth of rehearsals. Since Candy lives in Los Angeles and the rest of us were based in New York, we rehearsed without her until shortly before we had to leave for Germany, and then she flew to New York for a week's worth of woodshedding with us. In addition to Lennon/Tabacco/Zappa, Ed Palermo was also scheduled to perform at the festival, but festival finances being what they were, he was unable to bring his full band with him, so he scaled back his brass section and retained the saxes (bari, tenors, altos, and soprano), which meant he had to rewrite all his charts accordingly. We shared a rhythm section and the indefatigible Joe Meo, who played tenor with both groups (and doubled on guitar in L/T/Z). Our friend Jay Rozen was deputized to play tuba, and Mark Berman got the L/T/Z keyboard chair.

Our set consisted of equal parts Lennon and Tabacco material along with several Frank Zappa compositions, all of which was re-arranged for the present band. Long-suffering John bore the lion's share of the chart-copying misery. For three months he spent 12 and 14 hours a day hunched over various tables, copying and re-copying and re-re-copying parts for the horns and rhythm. The more he worked on charts, the more he began to resemble some medieval monk in a dim cell, scribing esoteric manuscripts that no one would ever read. John happens to be lefthanded, which he claimed made it twice as hard to copy music with a fountain pen. Because music (he tried to explain in self-defense) is written from left to right, as a result of leaning over the page with his left arm, the manuscript always got smudged. However, John also claims that in the past year or so his perfect pitch has consistently been a half step sharp. At least he was better off than Ed, who used a cassette deck and a "vintage" Mac computer to transcribe and print out his charts. Sometimes genius seems to require insurmountable obstacles in order to reach its highest potential.

Insurmountable obstacles notwithstanding, we learned the material, got through the rehearsals, and a mellow late-July afternoon found us all converging on the Air France terminal at JFK for the first leg of our flight to Germany, which would take us to De Gaulle airport in Paris. Immediately something about Joe Meo's shoes fascinated the security officers; of all of us, he was the only one asked to step aside, remove his footwear, and submit to an intricate examination with a strange black wand.

He seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

NEXT: Mayonnaise and the Future Imperfect

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