Zappa - C/D

That's how I remember the drunken conversation, anyway. There was also the how-dated-is-he question and the what-do-you-really-like-about-him demand. I had to answer these questions while, like, drunk.

I suppose the best I could come up with is that he's a composer. I love his guitar solos, I love his Mothers stuff, and I love his composed-for-rock-band stuff. I love his sense of humor. I love the fact that he did "Stairway to Heaven" note for note in concert until the guitar solo, when the horn section came in. He composed this stuff -- even the cover songs he does -- with great care. He knows where he wants the weird sounds to go and he puts them there.

I could say a whole lot more, but none of this will convince you, Kenan. That's fine. None of this convinces my downstairs neighbor, either.

*I find him kitschy.

>>> Yeah.

*I find him gimmicky.

>>>Sometimes, maybe a lot, actually. I tend to like gimmicks.

*I find that he meets almost none of my requirements for good music.

>>>Well, there ya go.

*He just shits on everything -- good taste, restraint, the world in general.

>>>Not true. I'll give you the part about good taste; I find pockets of his stuff unlistenable. But I can offer as an honest-to-god-homage-to-the-blues "Directly From My Heart To You" from Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Restraint? When FZ restrains himself, he is at his worst. The world in general? He shits on that? I think he viewed that as his fucking job.

*Where's the music?

>>>Huh, good question.

*Where's the part that supposed to touch me in any way other than on some pure intellectual, ironic level?

>>>The guitar solos??? I don't see how a guitar solo could be ironic or purely intellectual. You gotta put yer fingers right THERE on the fret when the finger with the pick is wobbling over here for the tremolo. And the feedback, man, the feedback! You must explain to me how this is "ironic" or "intellectual."

*You can combine the two, you know.

>>>I am open and willing to listen to a lot of things things that you might suggest that combine these two things (which I take to mean "music" and "intellectual").

*I mean, maybe YOU know, but Zappa didn't.

>>>No, I really don't know. And I don't know either if Zappa did. But I'll listen to his stuff over Ween any day.

Regards...(and no offense or anything, really)...

It's shocking how little I know of the man's work, given that I publish a fanzine which puns on his name.

Zappa was a pastiche artist. And smug about it. As a satirist, he doesn't make it at all, since you have to have some real emotion--rage or disgust, usually--to produce same. As a rip-off of 20th-century music he's laughable--it's like he discovered that music was "weird" in high school and wanted to shove it down our throats forever, while maintaining his love for '50s r&b (his one true love). As a guitarist he's done some, ahh, FAST shit but how this translates into IDEAS is frankly beyond me...two bars of Hendrix is worth all the wank that Zappa did his whole career. He did some interesting stuff with the Synclaiver toward the end of his career, but it's not something I care to listen to. His "compositions" have a certain Saturday-morning theme-show thing going for them; as do many people, I kind of enjoy "Hot Rats" as a good example of easy-listening. He fucked up "Trout Mask Replica." His "ideas" about American life/culture are as banal as they come. He's a pernicious example of L.A. fake-populism (really, contempt for humanity) at its absolute worst. The only stuff that holds up at all was done about 1966, like "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" and parts of "We're Only in It for the Money," which my eighth-grade history teacher used to play for us, along with Seals and Crofts, when he wanted to show us how the counterculture used to be.

Am i missing something?

What's god-awful about it? No gee-tar solos, or just the fact that it was recorded thirty-five years ago? Also, "Chaki," try to have a sense of humor and/or proportion about all this, it's just Frank fucking Zappa we're talking about here. I also dig "Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask" and "Idiot Bastard Son," if that makes you any less dyspeptic. Zappa music used quite well in scene in the great '60s flick "Medium Cool," by the way.

I didn't realize she had made a record.

''He fucked up "Trout Mask Replica."''

from a beefheart doc I have seen the line was that the magic band went in the studio and did a live album (it took them four hours) and Don made zappa push the buttons and that's it.

When Beffheart told zappa that the alb was done Frank was astonished but beefheart just said ''its done!''.

S: "Carolina Hard-core Ecstasy", "Flakes", "Joe's Garage", "San Bern'dino", a guitar solo or two.

i do need to get sleep sometimes, chaki ;-) but since i've been summoned ...

look, if someone doesn't like Frank Zappa (or any other musician), that's their prerogative. some have said that they don't like Zappa's music because of some quality of the music (i.e., Mr. Sinker doesn't like his voice and thinks the music is boring); some don't like it because of his lyrics (which, admittedly, aren't for everyone's tastes). all of that's fine AFAIC.

anyway, Zappa himself said that even his fans would find something in his body of work that they'd dislike. which is fair, because of the sheer volume and variety of his body of work. i guess i'm fairly conventional among Zappa freaks, in that i prefer his pre-eighties stuff (i think that he was in a bit of a creative slump from ship too late to save a drowning witch onwards, and didn't get back on track till broadway the hard way) -- though i'm a little more fond of the seventies stuff than some are. fwiw, i prefer Zappa's more pop/mainstream-friendly stuff (i.e., the seventies stuff) to Beefheart's more pop/mainstream-friendly stuff, but that's more because i'm not a big blues fan (and clear spot-era Beefheart sounds to my ears like blood sweat and tears or the doobie brothers; i prefer Beefheart when he's being a weirdo).

unlike the foregoing, though, superficially it's hard to think of anyone that really picked up the mantle from Zappa, going in directions where he pointed. except for the obvious choices like Primus or anything that Mike Patton is involved in, the only real obvious choice would be Ween (another love/hate proposition for many folks). but the Zappa influence on other pop/rock is there, if you listen for it and have heard enough Zappa to know what to listen for -- certainly in Parliament/Funkadelic (George Clinton was a huge FZ fan) and in stuff that P-Funk influenced (yes, including Dre and Public Enemy); also in some Krautrock (Can, esp.). but even in other less-obvious sources i can hear an echo or two -- i.e., i think that if he were alive, FZ would be a big fan of the Neptunes.

just my two cents for now.

but i am feeling too uncranky to finish this quotation as fact (and grammar) demand!!

Out of curiosity, Tad, what specifically do you think FZ would have liked about the Neptunes?

Things I don't like about Zappa: the toilet humor; overlong guitar solos; his singing (particularly when he's doing the mock 'doo-wop' stuff), but I think he knew that was an Achilles heel, so he hired better people to do that; his laughable defense of his own smoking while condemning drugs; in a sense, he painted himself into a corner with his smart-ass persona, in that there's a general sense of emotional distancing in his work

Random moments of Zappa that were/are/always will be classic:
- "Her favorite band was...Twisted Sister" (instead of "Her favorite band was...Helen Reddy") on an 80s version of "Honey, Don't You Want a Man Like Me"
- Juxtaposition of "My Sharona" riff with "But people say now he's mature..." in "Rhymin' Man"
- The first time I ever heard "Wowie Zowie"
- Swaggart re-write of "What Kind of Girl" on Broadway the Hard Way
- Brass arrangement of Jimmy Page's guitar solo for "Stairway to Heaven"
- Spine-tingling Supremes parody on the conclusion to "Duke of Prunes"
- "Truck Driver Divorce" (before the boring guitar solo kicks in)
- Angus O'Reilly O'Patrick McGinny (or whoever the hell he was) and his poems
- Brother A. West's monologue (so great, I memorized it and use it extensively whenever I dress up as a preacher on Halloween)

The only other Zappa that I can listen to and it isn't my favorite by any stretch, is the first two Mother's albums "Freak Out" & "Absolutely Free". They are definitely pieces of their time, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how much you like late 60s rock.

"Willie the Pimp" is cool and definitely aided by having Capt. Beefheart on vocals. It is a song worth searching, if you want to find one to check.

I've heard more Zappa records from the mid-70s to 80s, but none did much for me other than as a joke. The lone exception is "Jazz from Hell", which is an interesting listen, especially if you like music like Steve Reich. It is a weird synclavier machine music record. the synth sounds are kind of dated, but the sequences are still pretty weird. I checked it out from a libary.

you don't like zappa, you don't like echo and the bunnymen, you diss kraftwerk and KISS, you went to Penn State (and not Rutgers) and you like crud like Good Charlotte and Lame Pipsqueak ...

... mr. miccio, yer the anti-me! :-)

Wha? Where can I find this?

Well, he's right!!

that's from "THE BEST BAND YOU NEVER HEARD IN YOUR LIFE"

Why is it when I hear about these sorts of things that I can only hear Peggy Noonan saying, "Oh, Frank..."

You don't appreciate Zappa. Fine. Let's move on.

It seems, from talking to people about Zappa in particular, that whatever album(s) you picked up as a teenager remain these odd personal favourites that most of your friends won't really get. Could apply that to many artists, I suppose, but Zappa holds the crown.

Yes, the live volume is good, for starters. "The Illinois Enema Bandit" is the kind of thing I like but which is part and parcel of the Zappa thing that others hate. "Punky's Whips" is also quite fine but it also helps to know what it's about, which was a pic of Angel's lead guitarist one of Zappa's bandmembers used to masturbate over.

On "Burnt Weenie Sandwich," "Directly from My Heart to You" is a great number and performance, although he didn't write it.

Really? I thought that was a joke.

"I hear he's more fluid than Jeff B-e-eck."

There seem to have been a lot of guys who were too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippy (or too old to take it seriously) floating about the LA scene at that time - Kim Fowley for one.

he liked blues and the 20th century post classical canon without any qualifiers… heh, I just finished listening to Ruben and the Jets for the first time… I am going through his catalog from the beginning (while listening to other shit, like Zara Larrson right now) and I am liking it more than I thought I was going to…

Indeed his orientation was between beatnik and hippie, and his benchmark quality is a deep disgust with conventional culture/American society at large, and all the associated pieties and cant, not only w/r/t straight culture but also that of the counter culture… and so he was reflexively moved to oppose any intimation of sincerity perpetrated by anyone, ever… if anyone said "I like this, I believe this," he had to shit on them… when anyone said "I really mean this," he just saw someone trying to bullshit everyone else, no matter who it was, and goddamned if he was going to call it out…

which is to say, "so you don't like this shit, Frank? What do you like?" and the answer would have been that he likes his own music; certainly after 1969, he was dismissive towards any music that is not his own. In fact, a lot of popular shit, which was made to entertain his rock audience, seems to not interest him often: hot licks, Spike Jones compositional style and dirty jokes appears to have been what he did to sustain his operation: when there are no lyrics, like "Peaches en regalia" and other instrumental shit in the late 60s/early 70s, that's the closest he comes to showing he has heart, what moves him, what he cares about, re: his quote…

"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST."

Don't you think he could have understood Metal Box? No, it was made by punks, who in his understanding were just as much false industry confections as, I dunno, Sheena Easton… new wave was just poseur shit to him, unless his employees wished to make a nickel on their own as Missing Persons…

When he came out in 1966 until maybe even 1977, there really was no one like him in music: a deeply cynical truthteller, brutally exposing or mocking every piety and cant present in american and I guess global society and culture. I think that, if I was born in 1951 or 1941 instead of 1971, I would have been in thrall to him. But after 1977, there were lots and lots of musical and cultural figures that called bullshit on mainstream society, and those guys, like John Lydon, Steve Albini, Jello Biafra, Chuck D and KRS ONE could articulate viewpoints beyond Zappa's, and he never really could evolve his views…

which is to say, "so you don't like this shit, Frank? What do you like?" and the answer would have been that he likes his own music; certainly after 1969, he was dismissive towards any music that is not his own.

to be fair I don't feel like he listened to much else besides his own music. I can't imagine he had the time to. which is not to say he wasn't aware of what was going on I just don't see him actually having a record collection or unwinding by listening to the radio. that might be the main reason the few things he actually likes were from the 50's or before. of course the other thing is he saw himself as being in competition with everybody, you could tell by how upset he got when he thought anyone was appropriating his style, or say by his reaction when Belew got nabbed by David Bowie, you think he'd be like "yeah, you can't say no to Bowie" but no, he took that shit very personally.

and so he was reflexively moved to oppose any intimation of sincerity perpetrated by anyone, ever… if anyone said "I like this, I believe this," he had to shit on them… when anyone said "I really mean this," he just saw someone trying to bullshit everyone else, no matter who it was, and goddamned if he was going to call it out…

yup this seems to be the one consistent thing across his entire catalogue and every interview he gave, this idea that music was music and that any attempt to inject feelings or wisdom or romance into the lyrics could not possibly come from a sincere place. it is pretty interesting to take this in context with the stuff he actually did like; despite having a high degree of skill himself and demanding nothing but top-notch musicians I think he did love to see unskilled people just giving things a whirl, totally focused on the medium and not the message. on "Be-Bop Tango" he really did want people who did not know how to dance but were willing to give it a try. I feel like he was obsessed with things that were just unlike anything else. If someone is skilled at something but fails, they fail in a predictable way, whereas amateurs fail in ways that are totally unique and often can't be replicated. I think he really would've dug Tommy Wiseau had he lived long enough.

Zappa had a big 45 collection which he gave to daughter Moon, as recounted in her memoir. But that book also portrays him as very consumed with his own music almost all of the time.

Should also mention this is probably why he wanted to be associated with Trout Mask Replica, think he recognized that was always gonna be seen as one of the most unique pieces of “rock” music ever created