Dweezil Zappa has shared previously unreleased footage of him playing Crazy Train with Jack Black, and he's wielding Eddie Van Halen's famous 'Rasta Guitar' for the high-energy and highly silly performance.
On The Spot was a trivia show that first aired in 2003. Dweezil Zappa led the house band, and as the guitarist explains in a new YouTube video, their Ozzy cover was never aired. Rather, the band was fooling around and keeping the audience upbeat in between tapings of the show.
Zappa has found the footage deep in his archive, which, in this case, is a fancy word for cupboard. It also includes the band taking on I Love Rock & Roll, fronted by one of the show's stars, actress Arden Myrin.
“I'm glad I found these performances on a DVD,” Zappa writes. “I hadn't seen them in decades.”
Despite the cameos, its Dweezil’s electric guitar/amp pairing – Eddie Van Halen’s “rock 'n' roll vomit” guitar and a Peavey Wiggy amp – that steals the spotlight.
The guitar can be seen in 1981’s Unchained video and was used during the Fair Warning tour of that same year, but it looked very different then. It rocked a monochrome “circles” design, which Fender’s EVH brand honored with a reissue last year.
Van Halen then repainted the guitar, bestowing it his more traditional “stripes” design and adding a little green to his usual color palette.
“It got repainted on that tour by Ed, and he called it the Rasta guitar,” Dweezil explained when showcasing the instrument at Norman's Rare Guitars in 2019.
Its neck is also “rumored to be from [Eddie’s] black-and-yellow ‘Bumblebee’ guitar,” and the back of the body also features “some rock ‘n’ roll vomit,” Zappa says. “We don’t know whose. It looks like dog food remnants.”
Zappa says he first saw Eddie with the repainted axe in Life magazine when he was a kid, remembering: “It stood out to me because it was the only guitar he had that had green in it.”
Around a decade later, Dweezil spotted the guitar in a corner at Eddie's 5150 studio, where he was recording. He expressed an interest in the electric guitar, which Eddie nonchalantly said he could have.
The Wiggy, meanwhile, was Dweezil Zappa's unique amp design that looks like the lovechild of a wireless radio and a fighter jet cockpit. Only around 1,000 were reportedly made, and from its peculiar looks to its tech-laced innards, it represented a very experimental build.
“I designed the internals of Wiggy way back in 2000 for Dweezil,” Peavey Engineering Manager John C. Fields tells Ultimate Guitar. “It was based on the preamp section of the old [Rickenbacker] Road 440 Bass head, with an added fixed boost from the [Peavey] Dirty Dog pedal and a 100W full-blown TransTube power section, which even included a real output transformer.
“Frank Zappa used the Road 440 on most of his recordings throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as a platform for effects. The cosmetics were based on an Aston Martin that Dweezil had at the time.”
Dweezil's friendship with Peavey's then-Product Manager, Steven Volpp, meant “he pretty much gave Dweezil free rein to put whatever he wanted on there, with no regard, reason, or thought put into how our dealers would sell it.”
The amp, then, is immortalized in this performance, during which Jack Black goes hell for leather, clearly adoring every second of his Prince of Darkness impression. Years later, he’d host the singer’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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