BOBBY, SAY GOODBYE
I first made contact with Robert in 2008 when a friend
brought his Look Great Naked At Any Age
website to my attention. He readily agreed to answer my questions and also to
be put in touch with the Arf Society regarding appearing at a future Zappanale
festival in Germany. Obviously a very busy guy (aside from his fitness
programme, he also runs the Think Method music production company with Stephen
Boyd), it took some months to finally get this interview together. But I hope
you’ll agree it was well worth the wait.
IB: Tell me about
your earliest musical experiences.
RM: The first piece of music I remember identifying and
asking for was Stravinsky’s Firebird.
I was 2½ years old. It’s such visual music, and I had vivid images in my
imagination about what the sounds suggested. My parents were both opera
singers, and growing up in the 50s in Philadelphia, I was exposed to an amazing
variety of music. My parents were into all kinds of music and there was always
something playing on the old RCA Victrola. My grandmother worked at RCA in
Trenton New Jersey, and I still have quite a collection of 78 RPM records. I
was watching American Bandstand
before Dick Clark was on. The original host was Bob Horn. Rock and roll grew up
in Philadelphia as the nation tuned into the phenomenon, and I grew up right
along with it. There was an active jazz scene, and Coltrane spent quite a bit
of time there to study with a teacher named Dennis Sandoli. The Philadelphia
Orchestra has always been one of the best in the world, and I remember outdoor
summer concerts at the Robin Hood Dell Theater. Years later, when I went to the
Curtis Institute, I would study with many of the first chair players that I
admired so much as a boy. Music always made perfect sense to me. We had an old
Lester spinet piano when I was growing up, and I taught myself to play all the
music I was hearing as soon as I was big enough to reach up and touch the keys.
From a very early age, I recognized both chord progressions and melodies, and
was able to play them back after one hearing.
IB: You say you’re self-taught, but didn’t you have some
formal musical training: you can read music, right?
RM: As I mentioned, I began playing piano as soon as I
could reach up and touch the keys, even before I could see them. By the time I
began to take lessons at age eight, I already knew how to play blues and
compose strictly by ear. I took lessons for a short time and learned to read
music, but preferred what I was able to learn on my own and quit the lessons. I
had no formal lessons on French horn until I’d already been playing for ten
years, then plunged into intensive classical studies at the Curtis Institute of
Music in Philadelphia. I’m entirely self-taught on saxophone and vocals.
IB: Okay. How did you get to work with Frank?
RM: There are so many horror stories about top-notch
musicians crumbling at a Zappa audition, but my audition was a blast! Zappa’s
guitar tech for the 81 tour, Dave Robb, used to work for Orleans when I was in
that band in the late 70s. Dave called me and said Frank needed one more
musician for the 81 tour, and told me to come down the next day. I realized
there was no way to prepare for a Zappa audition in less than 24 hours, so I
decided not to try to prepare at all, and just go down and do what I do. He had
me sight-read various keyboard parts, and whenever something was technically
beyond me, I would just play the right hand. So he could tell I was able to
follow the crazy polyrhythms and metric modulations. Then he had me transpose
keyboard parts on tenor sax and French horn. Being a classically trained horn
player, transposition is a way of life, so it was no big deal, but certainly
not easy to transpose Zappa melodies on sight! He had me sight-read Black Page on tenor sax from a keyboard
part. The beginning of the melody moves fairly slowly, so that was no problem,
but when it got to the fast sixteenth notes, I would just play the first note
of each group through that section in order to stay on top of it. Then he said,
“Well, you can obviously read and play. I understand you sing real high and
strong. Let me hear you sing something. What do you know?” I hadn’t prepared
anything, so I just said, “I don’t know, Auld
Lang Syne.” So Frank turned to the band and said, “Auld Lang Syne, key of A.” Back then, I had pretty bizarre range,
and could sing a high “G” an octave and a half above middle “C” with no problem
in natural voice, no falsetto. So I sang the tune an octave higher than anyone
expected, in natural voice. Frank literally sat there with his mouth open, and
I knew I was in. I did every tour from then on. I didn’t have to audition for
anything after that, since most people in the business know that if you can
handle Frank’s music, you can handle anything. I was asked to join Bette
Midler’s band strictly on reputation, and things just went on from there. I
spent most of the 80s touring the world with major stars.
IB: What do you remember of the MTV performance in 81?
RM: That was my first Zappa tour - I still had a
moustache! I just watched some footage from that show and the energy was
amazing. It’s great to see Frank when he was young and healthy. As I recall, at
one point, the audience was passing a rubber raft around over their heads. It
was a wild night, Halloween in NYC, killer band, amazing music – great to have
been a part of it with Frank, Tommy Mars, Steve Vai and all the rest.
IB: Which was your favourite tour with Frank?
RM: 1988, hands down. The band was flat out amazing, and
I was the primary keyboard player for the first time. We had a superb
five-piece horn section, so I didn’t get to play sax, and very little French
horn. But it was such a blast to hear those guys play! We did some really
elaborate re-arrangements of old material, and a lot of free-form blowing as
well.
IB: And your memories of the 88 band’s demise?
RM: Not a happy subject, and not an easy one to talk
about, since it turned out to be not just the demise of the 88 band, but the
demise of Zappa tours as such. Essentially, the feeling of camaraderie within
the band disintegrated due to what I would describe as poor social skills on
the part of one band member in particular. He was a colleague, a friend, and an
intelligent and gifted musician, so I don’t choose to name names here. I had a
better relationship with him than most of the rest of the band, partially
because he respected my heavy classical background. When personal differences
within the band began to affect what was happening with the music onstage, we
all knew something had to change. A rift developed in the band and there was a
move to try to convince Frank to make a personnel change. I was actually
surprised that Frank seemed more intent on maintaining control of the individual
band members than he was with fixing what had become an obvious musical
problem. He wasn’t going to let the band force his hand on making a change,
even though the music was suffering, and he cancelled the remainder of the
tour. Needless to say, we were all disappointed, since the band was just so
ridiculously good.
IB: You refer to Frank when he was 'young and healthy'.
Were there any signs of his ill health in 88?
RM: None that I was aware of, or anyone else to the best
of my knowledge.
IB: When did you last speak to Frank?
RM: Frank became much more social towards the end and had
many eclectic gatherings of very diverse people at his house on Friday
evenings. The last one was only a few weeks before he died.
IB: You’ve made one solo album – what does it sound like?
RM: I landed a deal with MCA in 1982, and had in mind to
do a record that would be kind of like Ray Charles meets Steely Dan, because
that’s the way I write, or one of the ways. But my producer and manager and the
label had a very different idea of what they wanted, and the result was a
compromise that didn’t really please either me or them. It didn’t matter,
though, because a few weeks after it was released, MCA was bought by a large
conglomerate and virtually everyone at the label was replaced. Me and the new
regime didn’t really connect and we just said goodbye to each other and that
was it.
IB: Any plans for any more?
RM: Frankly, it’s not a burning desire at this point, but
it might become one. And of course with the technology today, I don’t need a
label’s money to do it.
IB: When and why did you decide you preferred ‘Robert’
over ‘Bobby’?
RM: I honestly never liked ‘Bobby’, it sounded like a
baseball player. Not that that’s bad, and I thought about being one
professionally. But I turned 40 in 1988 and decided it was time to go by the
‘grown-up’ name my parents gave me, and I asked Frank to start introducing me
as ‘Robert’. He was totally cool about it.
IB: Are you happy to talk about your time with Cybill
Shepherd – as her musical director?
RM: Cybill is more talented as a singer than most people
give her credit for. She was understandably nervous about covering an Aretha
Franklin tune for an episode of her TV show, but we worked together on it quite
a bit and she pulled it off really well. She’s incredibly focused and has a
remarkable work ethic. We played cabarets in NYC, London and LA, sometimes with
a quartet and sometimes as a duo with bass and drum tracks that I pre-recorded.
She was great with an audience and always gave an engaging, entertaining
performance. We were together for nearly five years, and there was a lot more
good than bad.
IB: You’ve played with a lot of ‘names’ – Prince,
McCartney, Midler, the Moody Blues. Tell me about some of your favourite sessions.
RM: One of my favourite experiences, other than every
concert with Frank, was the 1993 Earth Day performance at the Hollywood Bowl
with Paul McCartney. I was there singing backgrounds for Kenny Loggins, and
before Paul went on, he brought everyone together backstage and said, “I want
everyone to join me to sing Hey Jude at the end of my show.” When it was over,
Paul turned around, looked across the stage directly at me and came over and
shook my hand, before going on to greet everyone else. He didn’t know me, it
just worked out that way. There’s a video of the performance on YouTube, but it
cuts off before the end. Anybody out there have a photo?
IB: What are your recollections of the
Persuasions Frankly A Capella
sessions?
RM: It
was fun, it was quick, they liked me, I liked them, not much else to report.
IB: Aside from the Banned From Utopia, have you worked with any other Zappa
alumni since?
RM: No, just Banned From Utopia. I did a performance with
the Belgian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1994 called The Purple Cucumber, featuring music by a number of European
composers in the style of Zappa, but I was the only Zappa alumni involved. I’ll
be performing at the 20th Zappanale in Germany this August with some
other alumnae.
IB: What can the fans expect from you at Zappanale?
RM: Illinois Enema
Bandit, Black Page, City Of Tiny Lites, Zomby Woof. And Whipping Post.
IB: Oh, of course! How did you become involved in The Purple Cucumber project?
RM: They called me, I said yes. It had a bit of an
academic overtone, but it was fun. I think the orchestra members truly enjoyed
it.
IB: What are the chances of you being a Zappa Plays Zappa
special guest at some point?
RM: I have no idea, but I’d be happy to do it.
IB: Tell me about your Look Great Naked At Any Age venture – how did that all start?
RM: It started years ago, when I was touring all over the
world with Frank and various other artists. I’ve always been an athlete, and I
wanted to stay in kick-butt shape, but most of the time all I had out there was
me and my hotel room. So I created a system of bodyweight exercises for myself,
and fine-tuned it over the years to be more and more efficient and effective.
People have always asked me how I kept it together, when a lot of the people I
used to tour with are either dead or not doing so well. So I decided to put it
all on DVDs and make it available for everybody. I also recently posted a
series of ten videos on my blog to give people a very complete crash course in
getting yourself into great shape fast. Here’s a link to the tenth video where
I nail a rock solid handstand at age 60: http://lookgreatnakedatanyage.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/you%E2%80%99ve-got-to-see-this-video/
And here’s my website: http://lookgreatnakedatanyage.com
IB: Impressive stuff. Thanks for your time, Robert. See
you in Bad Doberan!
***
Photo
of Robert with the Idiot Bastard (and Uncle Ian) taken in Bad Doberan on 14
August 2009 by J-Roc.