Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

kurt OTM

Zappa was absolutely against censorship and being censored by the state but he was always off the money post We're Only in it for Money because that was the last time he was in touch with anyone

zappa was out of touch, Carlos had the market on progressive synth music covered in the 80s and he was doing some corny ass shit

biggest problem with sheik yerbouti is that he cut as much adrian belew from the songs as he could when belew left to tour with bowie. belew was the star of that band, and there's _lots_ of badass playing from him that was left on the cutting room floor because of personal animosity.

The posthumous release "Hammersmith Odeon" has 3 cd´s from that tour. Unfortunately without a version of "Wild Love". I liked the Capitol version of "Lumpy Gravy" (without the vocal parts and heavy razorblade editing) better than the official release. The Capitol version is on disc 1 of "Lumpy Money".

So I read Belew did the liner notes of a yet-to-be-released box of Zappa tour recordings, I think from '77.

Writing for orchestras, somehow I tend to see Zappa as a more melodic version of Boulez. "Yellow Shark" is a late masterpiece. I like it better than his Synclavier-music.

This is intriguing. Don't think I've ever heard Belew fully unleashed with Zappa.

jesus this kicks so much ass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBbH6EsNBAQ

Some epic keyboard grooves from Tommy Mars on this one

ok Zappa is a very strange choice for this

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/frank-zappa-hologram-to-perform-with-steve-vai-others-w504727

why is he a strange choice? the zappa cult has pretty much proven it will eat up anything plus guitar mag dorks are the biggest marks in music (throwing vai into the equation)

plus holo zappa can't throw them dirty looks when they fuck up

Zappa's shows tended to be improv and banter heavy. like what are they gonna do here.

collect the dough put it in the bank

how much is this really gonna make, after the cost of putting together the hologram (that's still quite expensive isn't it?) and paying all these musicians?

I'm sure the ticket prices will be nuts. This is such a fuck-you from Ahmet to Dweezil, it makes me sad.

not to mention that Frank himself would've absolutely hated this idea

frogbs it's almost touching the way you feel that somehow this fiasco must've been given some good thought or that ahmet gives a fuck if it's any good or not

my folks saw dweezil recently, they said it was a great show

I had a deep listen to Over-Nite Sensation, Apostrophe (') and One Size Fits All last night for the first time in a long while, and I really love how those records sound, just so warm. Every time I hear 'Inca Roads' I'm impressed that Zappa managed to get a bunch of musicians to play it - some of the passages/changes in that track are total wtf.

Belew on the hologram shows: holy shit, too much drama, count me out

here are my final thoughts on the entire Zappa affair: respectfully count me out.
I will not be playing Zappa music in the foreseeable future in any situation.
this whole thing is far too caustic and divisive.
I will say I have always admired Dweezil for playing his father's music and playing it so damn perfectly. I remember time spent with young Moon and how much I really liked her. recently I met Diva for the first time (she works on Billy Bob Thornton's tour) and she was very nice to me. though I have yet to meet Ahmet in person, he too has been nice to me. earlier this year he asked me to write liner notes for the upcoming Zappa Halloween box set and he treated me respectfully.
I do know one thing: Frank loved his family.
I have many positive creative things to do. I hope you all will enjoy them. none of them will have anything to do with the current Zappa universe, but I will always revere and love Frank.

https://www.facebook.com/AdrianBelew/posts/10150895474944995

Hey brimstead, I saw Dweezil years back - basically 3-4 hours of guitar solos, for better or worst. One thing I wonder regarding Zappa is how much he used tape manipulation in later material vs. his earlier records (from "Freak Out" through "Uncle Meat"). It seems the earlier records were rife with edits/jump cuts and his later material he used editing to graft his guitar solos onto random songs, but it's less obvious? Some of the documentaries go over this to some extent..

I think on the earlier records, the editing was meant to sound bizarre, even if the editing was brought on by having to censor the record (see the finely crafted edits on the '60s 'Harry, You're a Beast') - by the time he got to the late '70s, I think he became more concerned with smashing stuff from different sources together but trying to make it sound like it wasn't the case. I guess there was also an element of "let's see what interesting polythythms can happen", too...

*polyrhythms

yeah Turrican that sounds about right

It's hard to say what the ultimate example of his "xenochronous" approach is, though. Probably something from Sheik Yerbouti or Joe's Garage, I'd say. I think almost all of the guitar solos on the latter are shoehorned in from unrelated tracks.

rubber shirt

Yeah, that's the one I was mainly thinking of!

I'm wondering if the dislocated nature of Trout Mask Replica influenced Zappa's "xenochronous" approach.

never listened to joe's garage before

this is complete horseshit

its a grower man

Frank Zappa's JOE'S GARAGE: Classic or Dud?

catholic girls and crew slut are so bad jesus christ frank

Zappa's late '70s band were a great bunch of musicians, but his lyrics had gotten so puerile by that point.

ok fembot in a wet t-shirt might be worse, i'm out

I'm pretty sure that later on in the album he manages to outdo even that.

Zappa's attempts to parody his audience/or musical trends of the time (like new wave) were so misguided and bitter. Kind of guy who vouched for freedom of speech so he could say anything ignorant he wanted, but never truly gave you the idea if he MEANT it. Plus his audience loved it in the later part of his career, and he became the thing he was "sneering at" - a hateful bigot

For all I know I first came to it via ILX, but iirc this Ian Penman Wire essay resonated with a lot of anti-Zappa people:

http://e-limbo.org/articulo.php/Art/1259

ums, wait til you get to "Stick It Out"

For all I know I first came to it via ILX, but iirc this Ian Penman Wire essay resonated with a lot of anti-Zappa people:

http://e-limbo.org/articulo.php/Art/1259

― Josh in Chicago

for everyone who is worshipped as a god, there will inevitably be a richard dawkins, someone whose mouth-frothing opposition actually makes the object of his ire seem likable by comparison.

ums, wait til you get to "Stick It Out"

― frogbs

seriously, "the illinois enema bandit". absolute nadir of his catalogue, probably worse than "thing-fish" (a three-record musical which can most generously be described as "staggeringly ill-conceived").

that's not to say that "joe's garage" isn't utterly terrible, but he's done _so much worse_.

that essay ain't completely without merit though. "Jack-off of all trades" is a pretty good line. this part pretty much sums up what I find so frustrating about the guy:

He had long hair but sneered at longhairs; he made a long and lucrative career out of endless guitar solos but sneered at other rock musicians; he constantly bumped his little tugboatful of 'compositions' up against the prows of the classical establishment, but he lambasted that, too. In stuff like "The Torture Never Stops" and "Dancing Fool" he got some of his biggest audiences by exploiting the very idea of exploitation he was supposedly upbraiding. He sneered at people who took drugs; he sneered at their parents who didn't. Most of all, he sneered at women; girls trying to get by in a world of hateful, mastery-obsessed fools like himself. He sneered at anything which represented the mess and fun and confusion of life. He sneered, in short, at anything/everything that wasn't Frank Zappa.

obviously worth mentioning that a lot of his early work really was groundbreaking and subversive. I don't like stuff like "Billy the Mountain" all that much but I appreciate that they're still having fun at that point. I think a lot of the obnoxiousness, hypocrisy, and even misogyny could have been more easily forgiven if his stuff was actually funny. There's just so little cleverness in his work after 1969.

Who was it that smugly said "if you don't like it that's okay because you weren't supposed to" in the Zappa classic albums episode?

if you were stuck on the proverbial desert island, which disc(s) would you rather have ‹ one solitary song by Brian Wilson or the entire Zappa back catalogue?

Man, talk about your punch-in-the-face vs. kick-in-the-nuts dilemmas...

I've talked a bit about Zappa with my guitar teacher, who can play anything and whose rotating artist cover band has done a Zappa night once or twice. He's dug in deep before as prep work but still doesn't really rate Zappa as a guitarist or a composer, and despite liking bits and pieces of his catalog hypothesizes that Zappa's persona stems from a frustration with not being instrumentally adept or inventive enough as whatever kind of artist (classical, jazz, rock, whatever) he envisions himself as. That's why he defaults silly or sarcastic or snide, as a defense mechanism - "jack-off of all trades" indeed. It's really easy to be a bomb thrower accusing other artists of mediocrity when you can hire virtuosos to disguise or camouflage your own vampy mediocrity. Similarly, it's really easy to pretend to be a virtuoso by writing crazy charts then hiring the best people to play them, but he's no Carl Stalling.

I've got to admit, my very limited Zappa listening originated back when I would play drums, and I'd pick up something like "Joe's Garage" specifically because Vinnie Colaiuta was on it. I'm not sure I ever listened to the stuff as 'songs,' as such, just a vectors for the playing. But very quickly I gravitated more toward straight fusion or jazz or other stuff with better playing, because it was in service of better compositions and wasn't hampered by some dude(s) ironically singing about VD or something.

its a grower man

No, he's right, it's horseshit.

Good post, JiC.

if coming up with a good zing was a rare or valuable gift, if that one zing wasn't buried in an ocean of overheated rhetoric, i might rate "jack-off of all trades" more.

that quoted paragraph... it's not wrong, but it also comes off as a paraphrasing of zappa's own "i'm not satisfied" from '66:

"I'm not satisfied
Everything I've tried
I don't like the way
Life has been abusing me"

well carve _that_ on his tombstone.

penman's piece also comes off as, well, an extended sneer. zappa had the temperament, though not the literacy, to make a pretty good rock critic.

as an aside, i think the whole "mediocre guitar player" thing is overstated. yeah, he did more than his share of mediocre vamping. yeah, compared to some of his "sidemen", like belew, he was a hack. but this "zappa as second-rate guitar player" narrative requires one to overlook that he played a lot of really good shit. "cookin' turnips", "400 days of the year", "willie the pimp" (god do you know how many _bad_ versions of "willie the pimp" there are? the "hot rats" version isn't one of them), "the ocean is the ultimate solution"... his big problem is that he never paid enough attention to tone, and as a result many of his solos blend together into one long weedly-weedly-wee. but he could play very well, usually when pushed out of his comfort zone (the issue being, really, that zappa went to great lengths to keep that sort of thing from happening). that impromptu acoustic duet he did with shuggie otis on the johnny otis show in 1970 - zappa holds his own extremely well there. or playing with pink floyd in 1969 - one wouldn't necessarily think that zappa would sound that good playing "interstellar overdrive", but he fits in pretty damn fantastically.

rushomancy otm. guy is not a fuckin' guitar god but he can play, his tone is ridiculous and he's doing it just going direct, and he generally doesn't overplay. he likes to overplay when the crowd's into it but as a guy coming at playing electric from a blues reference and trying to shoehorn that into aspirationally "difficult" music in a rock context, he's prety fuckin' good.

everybody else otm about how poorly all his shtick has aged. as a kid, I thought he was fucking hilarious, and I feel embarrassed to have been as open as I was to his smugness/condescension/general grossness. I do remember his SNL appearance ("dancin' fool" & something about the meek not inheriting the earth) as the point where I went - you know - I think I'm not into this shit now, was it always bad like this?

There's no doubt at all the guy is a more than competent musician. That's not my point. My point is that he's a snob and a musical elitist, but he himself is pretty generic, really highlighted by hiring folks like Belew or Via or whomever to show off in his place. Like, you can't make a big to-do about complexity and sophistication and virtuosity and then stink out ploddingly generic blues licks. It's like the bits of pieces I've heard from Phish. Like, I get it, dude, but you're no Jerry Garcia. (Ironically, Phish-dude is very Zappa-esque in his playing.)

ehhh, you kind of lose me when you posit jerry garcia as offering some alternative to "ploddingly generic licks".

anyway, steely dan are just as smug and elitist. they're just more _literate_ about it.

Sorry, was in rush. Not a Dead fan myself, but Garcia had personality.