“In earlier [Zappa] bands, what I did was more bassoriented, playing notes and adding ‘eyebrows’ where I could,” says Scott, discussing the evolution of his role. “In 1988, Frank gave me no direction. None! He never said no to anything I did.” In that spirit, Thunes made the ornery composition “Alien Orifice” [Make a Jazz Noise Here, Barking Pumpkin, 1991] his own personal showcase of what a bassist could do in Zappa’s later live setting, rocking and reharmonizing this nasty piece with almost limitless dexterity and depth throughout.
Thunes was anything but typical. He beat on a thrashed ’65 P-Bass with a pick, openly defying the era’s slicker-sounding hi-fi bass sounds. His musically formative influences were scattershot: Led Zeppelin, Yes, and Mahavishnu (his one step toward fusion), then classical study at 16 on upright at Northern California’s College of Marin (proclaiming “rock is dead” to anyone who’d listen), then new wave (Devo) and punk (the Buzzcocks) on his way to landing the Zappa gig at just 21. Thunes showed up rough, smart, and ready, employing a conservatory-trained musician’s knowledge and a punk rocker’s aggression to cop some of the music world’s most difficult parts. He played against drummer Chad Wackerman as much as with him. (On the glaring stylistic mismatch with his rhythm-section partner of seven years, he offers, “We didn’t have much of a musical connection.”) Scott Thunes didn’t make any sense, didn’t fit in any boxes, and could play anything Zappa wrote. No wonder Frank liked him.
Thunes kicks off the head of “Alien Orifice” with traditional jazz-swing walking—yes, with a pick, on a P-Bass, with the brightest steel strings available, and with chorus engaged!—through four chords over 16 bars, catching awkward 16th-note kicks in bars 2, 6, and 14. The polyrhythmic 16-bar melody (a strange challenge to walk over) repeats at letter B, where Thunes plays a Zappa-composed bass line of cascading upper-tension arpeggios that fall over each of the four strings (see the tablature for some fingering fun). The 11ths, 9ths, and 7ths float seamlessly into 5ths and 3rds in a manner a music professor would appreciate. Meanwhile Thunes greases it up with popped accents, using his middle and ring fingers while still holding the pick. This is supposedly a walking section, but with all the pops, arpeggios, and non-idiomatic fills on display (see bars 28 and 31–32), Thunes gleefully smashes the conventions of jazz bass to bits.
After walking another 16 bars, the tune shifts dramatically into a rocked-out open guitar solo groove at D, and Scott and Chad have their way with each other. Thunes plays with, off, around, and against the jazz-fusion monster Wackerman, filling with upper-tension minor chords in bars 53 and 57, sledgehammer-picked runs in bars 66, 68 and 69, and allout rock/blues mayhem in bars 74–80. This leads into a sudden change in time (3/4) and genre (back to jazz) at E, which is innocent enough until all hell breaks loose at F. The 2/4 time signature and crazed chords are from Zappa’s original 1981 chart (supplied graciously by Zappa family vaultmeister Joe Travers), and the melody (played by guitarist Mike Keneally on the recording) is an endless string of jagged, outré 16th-notes. Meanwhile the bass line is all Thunes, as he slides from picked funk and popped accents (bars 101–104) to one bar of insane unison (bar 110) to a quasidisco groove (bars 111–113) before pounding through seven bars of lightning-fast, tonally shifting 5/16 bars … which sets up a reggae groove, of all things, to restate the head and close out the tune with chords so dense and dissonant they almost defy classification. “I never played reggae [before joining Frank’s band]. Ever!” Thunes declares, laughing. It sounds like it, and yet what he did works in its own cruelly subversive, ironic way.
Whatever genre Frank felt like throwing in the pile, it was the musicians’ job to play the essential piece correctly, and add their own personalities (the last thing Frank wanted was autopilot; he reprimanded Thunes for being too static on a previous tour). But they couldn’t do too much, or else they’d get what the band called “The Clamp,” which was Frank’s way of publicly reining in the offender. Zappa’s musicians lived in considerable fear of “the Clamp,” so Thunes’s outrageous line in “Alien Orifice” is an even greater testament to Frank’s trust—and Scott’s ability to know just how to push Zappa’s barely detectable envelope.
From his home in Marin County, Thunes—the last bassist Frank Zappa ever auditioned—reflects on this now 20-year-old performance. “I hear the bass doing what’s necessary and important for Frank’s music. [It’s] the pure essence of what I loved about bass inside Frank’s music coming to the fore.” Then, finally: “I did as much as I was required, as much as I was forced to, and as much as I could get away with.”