On June 16, 1983, Frank Zappa appeared on Late Night with David Letterman to promote his latest album, London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. 1. Among the topics the musician discussed during his second-to-last interview on the show were people wearing brown lipstick and how he managed to get the London Symphony Orchestra to collaborate with him (Spoiler alert: He paid them). Another topic the pair touched on at one point was Zappa’s interest in hosting his own late-night talk show. According to Zappa, he even went so far as to pitch an idea for one to a network years earlier.
“Around 1968, I tried to do that,” Zappa said. When he made his proposal, however, executives weren’t too keen on the type of show he was looking to do. Letterman then questioned Zappa about who had turned him down, and he replied that he thought it was NBC (the network Letterman’s show aired on in those days). “It’s, uh, kind of surprising they wouldn’t go along with ya,” Letterman said with a smile. “There’s no accounting for taste,” responded Zappa.
Letterman also pressed the rocker on who he would’ve liked to interview if he’d been given the opportunity to bring his concept to life. Zappa’s description for his dream show was as follows: “Well, what I would’ve done at that time would be to take people who were in politics and put them…next to each other on a couple of chairs with people from, uh, rock ‘n’ roll, or from the arts, or, you know, just people that you wouldn’t normally expect to confront each other and, uh, let ‘em hack it out.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s basically the premise Bill Maher would use in 1993 for his popular talk show Politically Incorrect. That’s not to say Maher stole the idea, but it’s undeniably something that Zappa came up with first and shared publicly ten years before Maher’s version existed. It’s unclear if Zappa, who died the same year Politically Incorrect debuted, had seen or ever commented on the series, but his children appeared on it after his death. Politically Incorrect was canceled by ABC in 2002 and Maher carried the format over to his long-running HBO talk show, Real Time with Bill Maher, which he continues to host to this day.
Check out Zappa’s full 1983 interview with Letterman below.
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