Zappa - C/D

("People are not influenced by song lyrics" was not his main point.)

Yeah, but that was earnestness very much out of character.

I don't get the tendency on ILM to judge an artist by their entire career. Zappa is similar to the Dead in that sense. They each made about 5 or 6 great albums at the start of their career before a long and prolific downhill slide and tons of live dreck. But people always want to focus on the later stuff and their bad perceptions of all of the fans who like the later crap. I knew that somebody would claim that WOIIFTM was an outlier. But to me it makes sense to start from what are widely considered to be the artist's best albums.

I love the sound of the Ruben and the Jets album - the arrangements and Ray Collins' singing in particular.

do love ruth underwood, good showcase, and a pretty sweet jam once they get away from being all "crazy":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PS_AVFIGEk

A couple of years ago, when I heard that Frank was ill, I called him up. For 14 years we had no contact at all. He invited me to the house and we enjoyed some really nice visits with each other. Last June ('93) he called and asked if he could sample some of my stuff. I was shocked because I hadn't touched a pair of mallets since March of '77. I ended up practicing for 14 hours, which was all the time I could get together in the context of my life now. I spent four days at Frank's house sampling. This was really a miracle for me - that I could be reunited with him and still have something to offer.

i'm not a fan, so i don't know whether or not that's the best display of ruth, but it always impressed me

if he'd, like, spent some time in therapy, or maybe dropped some acid, might have shed some of his insecurities and been an artist who didn't have to cloak his work in nasty insecurities

LOL.

No doubt he heard this all the time! And it's been brought up a few times on these Zappa thread. If only he wasn't an asshole and liked people....well maybe he just wouldn't have a reason to make music. Frank Zappa the well-adjusted encyclopedia salesman or something.

What do you recommend, Primal Therapy? Healing crystal? Maybe Xanax, or put him on some other anti-depressants? The world was trying to change FZ and he in turn was like 'Who are you to tell me what to be?' Thus horrible songs about the worst scum on the planet.

It's funny dyspeptic 'cos it's true.

("People are not influenced by song lyrics" was not his main point.)

ok, thanks. huh. maybe i am confusing his testimony with someone else's, or an incidental soundbite of his delivered to me

billy joel's of course, got really heated

anyway i still think zappa was a creep and would have been less so if he had maybe experimented with drugs (@ adam bruneau)

What was Billy Joel's testimony? I can't find any record of it

sorry that was a "joke"

#kennybania

I don't know one person who went to music school who isn't pretty down on music school

I think your general point is valid...but the Dream Theater dudes (who I've had several excellent conversations with at this point) would probably be the huge glaring exception to this rule.

I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm down on music school per se btw.

What do you recommend, Primal Therapy? Healing crystal? Maybe Xanax, or put him on some other anti-depressants? The world was trying to change FZ and he in turn was like 'Who are you to tell me what to be?' Thus horrible songs about the worst scum on the planet.

I recommend straight old therapy for people who are walking around angry at all humans all the time. I do understand that you, like Zappa, are above all that, 'cause you've seen through the charade of all these phonies peddling their cures. May I one day rise to your level of wisdom!

Is there any truth at all in the cliché that happiness dries up the artistic impulse?

Or should I say, any untruth at all? Obviously, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

@ del ohhhh I see. I knew lots of pretty white-bread musicians were testifying as well but BJ did seem pretty far-fetched. I was thinking "what song was offensive? Allentown? I give up."

Is there any truth at all in the cliché that happiness dries up the artistic impulse?

whether my writing is any good or not in general is not for me to say, but the work I do that people seem to like best is almost always written when things are going well for me. when things are not going well for me I do not feel like writing at all. there have been a couple of exceptions to this in recent years which were kind of revelatory for me but for the most part, the healthier I am, the better my work seems to me, and, just on the response of the people who like it, to others.

I know death metal dudes who write strictly as a way to exorcise long-harbored anger and to work through the kind of sadness generally associated with, you know, "sad songs," though.

77.

Sometimes Zappa will catch me unawares and I'll realize, oh wait, "Peaches en Regalia" is actually kinda charming, WTF, a slip or poor quality control or something?

I sometimes wonder what I would have majored in had I been happier in late adolescence.

I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm down on music school per se btw.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, August 12, 2012 11:17 AM (2 hours ago)

Yeah, neither am I.

This thread has caused me to pull Hot Rats and Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar out of storage (OK, off my external hard drive and into my iPod). Damn you all.

Wow, that whole show contenderizer pulled Inca from upthread is fantastic

yeah, a friend who's is (or once was) a pretty big zappa fan played it for me a while back. didn't covert me, but i do quite like some of it.

That Roxy-era band is the best.

Yeah the only Zappa LP I really listen to regularly is the 1974 Helsinki gig. It's really nice to see them on video, even if whoever edited it needs to get beaten with a lead pipe

people who are walking around angry at all humans all the time

Do you really think this about Zappa as a person or is this your critique on his work? His satirical songs are too silly and collaborative and self-aware to come across as "angry at all humans". Most footage I've seen of the live performances, it looks like everyone in the band is having a good - if not hilarious - time.

"("People are not influenced by song lyrics" was not his main point.)"

Could you elaborate? I thought his main point was (paraphrased) "There is no magic word that, once sung, can make somebody kill or otherwise act like an idiot"

I like The Velvet Underground but yeah I don't know if I'd get along with Lou Reed as a person. It really doesn't matter to me. He's putting on a persona in a song and when I listen I'm indulging it just like he is, and that's just how the musician-audience listening experience. We're both connecting to something that transcends personal differences. Maybe it's stupid and gross but the world can be stupid and gross at times just like it can be at beautiful other times.

"just how the musician-audience listening experience works"

Uh sorry for that grammar. I'm kind of out of it.

Your Dedalus to Lou's Bloom was such a perfect wit.

Getting back to the "Zappa Hates Music" thing: I can't claim to be an expert on Zappa or anything, but one of the things I took away from reading the autobio a couple years ago was that during the latter half of his career he became more entrenched in his dislike of "Rock Music" and it's audience. He'd always held contempt, but as in private he was moving more towards Contempory Composition and attempting to write for orchestras, he began to churn out more low-brow rock stuff and perform concerts of that material so he could raise money to have scores drafted in hopes for getting major ensembles to perform his "Serious Music". He doesn't say in so many words, but he basically considered his commercial stuff from the late '70s-early '80s pandering to the rock crowd (with of course a bunch of caustic social commentry and jaw-dropping explorations of musical chops integrated in).

Do you really think this about Zappa as a person or is this your critique on his work?

in every interview and in his work it seems this way to me - it's not just me, we went into this upthread. it's like, the targets of his attacks aren't always necessarily hypocrites or Bad Dudes - they're just people living their lives and getting called big dummies for it by (the narrator of) Frank Zappa ('s entire ouvre pretty much without exception). He is a case - I think there are more of these than people generally allow - where the work and the person are expressions of the same character, which in Zappa's case is a pretty nasty bit of work. Sometimes that can be pretty hilarious, sometimes it's a moot point because he's just telling little stories without heroes or villains but a bunch of schmoes the he (or his persona, if we insist, but I don't) really thinks are clued-out dickheads.

this gets us into lots of general propositions about writing & performance & big long late night coffee discussions but yeah. I think persona as shield from evaluation of person is a vastly, vastly overstated proposition. if your entire career you sing songs through the voice of a guy who looks down on everybody & that guy is pretty much never skewered by your satire, you're telling me something about yourself whether you like it or not.

I say this, mind you, as a guy who is listening to loads of Zappa and loving it right now. But I do think, no, it's not that this guy's persona is unpleasant. It's that this guy is a dick.

and would have been less so if he had maybe experimented with drugs

lol

OTM. I've been a dedicated FZ listener since I bought Sheik Yerbouti in mid-1979 -- bought everything, sold half of it in the late 80s, repented and rebought it all, read most of the bios and a lot of the interviews, and he was just a deeply hate-driven person at his core. The "why" will never really be known -- he had a few really awful experiences, but couldn't process them emotionally so they kept coming back up as gouts of bile.

I think the main aspect of his compositional genius is that as an autodidact, he really did see all music as flowing from the same headwaters, and refused to accept the genre differences that separated Johnny "Guitar" Watson from Edgard Varèse. But that put him in opposition with everybody -- he hated the pop industry for its shallowness but worked in it to pay the bills. He hated the classical field for grinding away at the same old canon of classical literature and not supporting new composers. He had a lot of contempt for classical players who had loads of talent but lax work ethics (cf the 200 Motels sessions and the tipsy out-of-tune trumpets at the LSO sessions).

The only time he could tamp all that shit down was when he was hiding behind a big stack of staff paper, imo.

xpost

Could you elaborate? I thought his main point was (paraphrased) "There is no magic word that, once sung, can make somebody kill or otherwise act like an idiot"

I went through it once more: I do not see that idea in Zappa's statement concerning the PMRC, even though it is an idea he has expressed elsewhere. The main points seem to be:

i) The spouses of some of the PMRC founders were also involved with a proposed blank tape tax, which was under discussion at the same time and which affects the same industry (and which Zappa opposed, although if it's what I think it is, I do not oppose it myself), suggesting a potential conflict of interest. As such, the PMRC's proposals and tactics were a sensationalist distraction. (This argument seems pretty dubious to me but it comes up throughout his statement).

ii) The PMRC's proposals raise First Amendment concerns since a) they would lead to de facto censorship when large chains had already said they would not stock albums with certain labels and b) their system for labelling rock albums was implicitly based on Christian fundamentalist values.

iii) Parents should in fact be able to control what their children are exposed to but the PMRC's proposed system was not a good way of helping them do this for a number of reasons. Zappa did in fact support the idea of simply printing the complete lyrics of every album and making them available to consumers before they purchase any album. It would also be more effective to promote Music Appreciation programmes in schools so that children could make more informed decisions and might actually sometimes want to hear classical or jazz albums instead of pop. (Zappa also promoted the idea of parents buying classical and jazz for their kids instead of buying Prince records and then getting worked up over them. Btw, the language he used when talking about this seems to support C. Grisso/McCain's contention.)

iv) Many of the things that were sung about on 'offending' records, such as masturbation or female arousal, were not illegal anyway.

v) The PMRC unfairly focused on rock albums, as opposed to, say, country or comedy records. This system would amount to a de facto subsidy of the country industry. Again, he suspected a conflict of interest, considering the Gores' home state.

He argued that labelling albums was not the same as rating films because actors in films are 'pretending' whereas labelling a recording is passing a judgment on the musicians who made the album, which I'm not sure I buy.

He argued that labelling albums was not the same as rating films because actors in films are 'pretending' whereas labelling a recording is passing a judgment on the musicians who made the album, which I'm not sure I buy.

also a counterargument to the contention that Zappa's using persona as a governing conceit, weirdly

at least we know where zappa stood on the burning question of ccr's authenticity

Where?

WmC's post was awesome, btw.

does this awesome, ahead of it's time song means i should check out the whole album?, cause i don't like Zappa in general

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=girnJH7tvpM

Lol, possibly not. Legend has it that that's the song they were playing at the Whisky when Tom Wilson saw them and signed them to Verve. He kinda lived to regret it when they went into the studio to record the album, and a lot of the material veered off in a wildly different direction. On the other hand --

Frank Zappa paid this tribute: "Tom Wilson was a great guy. He had vision, you know? And he really stood by us ... I remember the first thing that we recorded was 'Any Way the Wind Blows,' and that was okay. Then we did 'Who Are the Brain Police?' and I saw him through the glass and he was on the phone immediately to New York going, 'I don't know!' Trying to break it to 'em easy, I guess." "Wilson was sticking his neck out. He laid his job on the line by producing the album."[7]

I mean, if it's the avant-garde stuff you don't like, then Freak Out could definitely fool you into getting something you're not. This was not the form that most of his protest music took.

Get "Absolutely Free" then "We're Only In It for the Money"

Hey, lots of Zappa up on Spotify - don't know if it's been mentioned yet.

"Trouble Every Day" is generally one of the few Zappa tunes that even the non-fans can agree on. Other one is "Peaches en Regalia". Freak Out! is an excellent album but believe it Zappa does not usually sound like that!

shame..thanks though

"Anyway the Wind Blows" is a favourite of mine too. Sometimes I think it's the best thing he ever did.

as a pastiche maybe