Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

But he only put the stupid jokes in to sell records to morons and so finance his stunningly dull serious music endeavours. Is an argument I've heard.

That's the argument Zappa himself makes in his autobiography! "For entertainment value only" is the term he used IIRC.

With the interminable xylophone noodling and bad sex jokes obscuring the occasional extremely tasty guitar solo or interesting tune, his 70s discography is absurdly offputting for people with knowledge of what proper hipster Miles/Can/King Crimson weirdo jazz-prog-rock should sound like. If instead you start with Freak Out / Absolutely / Only In It For the Money and center your appreciation of him as "decent disaffected songwriter taking the piss out of psychedelia", I think the 70s stuff makes a little bit more sense. Most of it does sound bad to me still, but I kind of perceive it in a context of a dude who's still sort of searching for strange sounds, while filtering his world view through parody and sexual exposure (naked disgusting humanity isn't it funny). That is, the smut is ideological not just a way to pay the bills. I think it's hard for me to appreciate how shocking Dyna Moe Hum or some other stupid sex song was in the 70s.

I think a decent compiler could easily make a much improved introduction to Zappa where disc 1 is a tour through his 60s weirdness with snippets of legitimate and parodic psych, doo wop and fine instrumentals; and disc 2 is the more digestible 70s stuff like Camarillo Brillo, Inca Roads, Black Napkins, Watermelon in Easter Hay, casting him as a sort of 70s guitar weirdo rather than an unfunny, unfunky George Clinton.

This stance probably derives in some way from his early arrest for making a "pornographic audio recording" upon request from an undercover cop

I WAS NOT AWARE OF THIS O_O

wiki:

An article in the local press describing Zappa as "the Movie King of Cucamonga" prompted the local police to suspect that he was making pornographic films.[9]: 85  In March 1965, Zappa was approached by a vice squad undercover officer, and accepted an offer of $100 (equivalent to $821 in 2020) to produce a suggestive audio tape for an alleged stag party. Zappa and a female friend recorded a faked erotic episode. When Zappa was about to hand over the tape, he was arrested, and the police stripped the studio of all recorded material.[9]: 85  The press was tipped off beforehand, and next day's The Daily Report wrote that "Vice Squad investigators stilled the tape recorders of a free-swinging, a-go-go film and recording studio here Friday and arrested a self-styled movie producer".[25] Zappa was charged with "conspiracy to commit pornography".[1]: 57  This felony charge was reduced and he was sentenced to six months in jail on a misdemeanor, with all but ten days suspended.[9]: 86–87  His brief imprisonment left a permanent mark, and was central to the formation of his anti-authoritarian stance.[9]: xv  Zappa lost several recordings made at Studio Z in the process, as the police returned only 30 of 80 hours of tape seized.[9]: 87  Eventually, he could no longer afford to pay the rent on the studio and was evicted.[24]: 40  Zappa managed to recover some of his possessions before the studio was torn down in 1966.[9]: 90–91

he actually spent time in jail for that!??!! no wonder he was such a grouch.

i keep getting recommended the documentary on hulu and every single time i consider it for a good ten seconds before moving along. i think i'll probably hate-watch it one of these days.

yeah if I spent time in gail for that I'd probably become a galaxy brain weirdo too

lol Freudian slip there ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03480/78674585_B58EAW_Fr_3480132b.jpg

(xp) LOL, awesome

I think my preferred Zappa era is very specifically Hot Rats, I have gotten a ton of mileage out of that Sessions box.

jon otm. hot rats is decent. shuggie otis, the most underrated of all time, plays bass on "peaches en regalia." i used to joke that frank was smart enough to not be outshined on his own record, so he wouldn't even let shuggie touch a guitar for the session.

shuggie otis, the most underrated of all time

By whom? Every half-assed scrap of tape he ever released floats in a lake of critics' jizz.

I generally like the original Mothers, it's kind of like the original Alice Cooper band I consider that a band and distint from the rest

yeah i’ve never been much of a zappa fan but i can always enjoy hot rats.

I've often wondered why "Hot Rats" is the Zappa album even non-Zappa fans like, I think the fact that his voice is entirely absent from it might have something to do with it.

yeah — and it does have beefheart, so that's fun.

LOL – I was gonna say something similar to unperson, but waaaay less pointedly (and humorously)

i was being purposely irreverent and hyperbolic because i am a huge shuggie otis fan.

zappa thread lacks sense of humor and retorts with semen joke; very on-brand.

Good breakdown of that porn audio tape story in the "Trouble Every Day" ep of the History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast.

On Shut and Play and I am getting used to the way the gamely way the percussion is used (I should replay Boulez here). The tracks with "electric sitar" are a good touch, and I'm ok with bits of dialogue that cut off...a fucking good Zappa album is not a thing I'd ever thought myself saying.

Anything with even bits of Beefheart I don't really count as Zappa. It's a roundabout, cheating way of making good music.

How large an influence did he have on the development of prog? Was he a beacon for what could be done with rock music. Combination of r'n'r and more 'serious' musics and is that a good thing or something that would have inevitably have happened anyway. & do other bands do better versions of what he started anyway. Do love Area's takes on music i hear as being very based in what he was doing though they do add their own quirks. & that Mothers or early 70s sound seems to be something that a lot of bands utilised and built on.

so other people are hearing gamelan in some of his music?

If it is it's probably via Harry Partch or Lou Harrison possibly indirectly, I mean, I have no idea whether Zappa ever listened to either but that seems more likely than him listening to gamelan. As mentioned earlier, he doesn't seem to have had much interest in 'world music'.

or maybe henry cowell or colin mcphee: the latter actually based on the west coast around the right time, as professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA in the late 50s, after a lot of scholarly work on the musics of bali from 30s onward

i still feel that the permutational rhythmic organisation of gamelan is precisely the kind of thing that's anathema to zappa, who had a very centralised conception of the conductor-composer-controller -- he really wasn't drawn to any of the minimalist or proto-minimalist sound palettes either -- BUT some of his musicians may have been (ruth underwood? idk, it was much more widespread by the early 70s) and he *did* of course hire his players very much to unleash their thing (under his very strict control lol)

"if it's me and yer captain on bongo fury, it's the mothers of invention"
— bob marley

mcphee's tabuh-tabuhan is enough like stravinsky's petroushka that it might actually have pricked up frank's ears (and it was already on record back in the 1940s, and then again in the 1950s alongside roger sessions and elliott carter, who are more zap's jam imo)

but i suspect he likes xylophone etc more via boulez

Yes, I think if he did end up on the vicinity of gamelan, sonically at least, it would very much be through the Western conservatory music route.

Groening: What about Asian music? Indonesian?

Zappa:You mean gamelan music?

Groening: Gamelan, Balinese, or Javanese?

Zappa:That wears on me. The timbre of it is nice, but it goes on and on like a Harry Partch piece. They can play that same pentatonic thing for centuries on end. That's as close as you're going to get to minimalist music.

Menn: What about music from Africa? Do you ever listen to the tribal stuff?

Zappa:Yeah. I've heard it, but I'm... a lot of people are fascinated by the rhythm, but the rhythm of it is not so exciting to me. I'm not as interested in African music as I am in Bulgarian or Sardinian or Indian music. I think a lot of people listen to African music and want to consume it in the same way that they would consume a U.S. drum machine record. That fancy constant rhythm. And my taste in rhythm goes in other directions.

Groening: What about reggae?

Zappa:I don't have a collection of reggae music.I like to play it more than I like to listen to it. Reggae is a ventilated rhythm. If you're going to play a solo with a lot of notes in it and your rhythm accompaniment has a lot of notes in it, then it neutralizes it. I find it more intriguing to play to a reggae background with jagged pulses and big holes in it - there's blank space, whereas the least comfortable thing for me to play to would be something like a fast James Brown band. I wouldn't know what the fuck to do with that.

https://www.angelfire.com/in/eimaj/interviews/frank.zappa.html

He's such a self-obsessed dick, like an even snobbier Morrissey, just replace the New York Dolls with Varese. His music alludes to all sorts of music, from psych to reggae, but it's always a gag. If you say he nails it, he can say he tossed it off. If you say he falls short, he can say it was just tossed off. And no matter what he does, it's always the band or the musicians that fall short of his vision, or the audience fails to grasp it.

But, like this:

Groening: What do you think about the traditional composers? Do you care for the old guys?

Zappa:Well, name me an old guy.

Groening: Beethoven?

Zappa:I have an appreciation for the skill of putting it together, but the sound of it is not something that I enjoy, so....

Menn:Brahms? Bach?

Zappa:Bach is more interesting.

Menn: Why?

Zappa:I just like the way it sounds. The same reason I like Varese. I like the way it sounds. But I wouldn't go out of my way to attend a Bach concert or buy an album of that kind of music. To me, of that period, that is the most tolerable of the material to listen to. I don't start getting interested in so-called classical music until the early 20th Century.

Hmm, could it be that it's out of his reach as a composer, but the freedom of 20th century stuff (the more experimental stuff, not Stravinsky or whatever) he can if not aspire to then kind of approximate? And if he falls short ...

No, I doubt he would ever say his serious music was tossed off. However he was forever blaming the musicians for not performing it right.

I'm sure I mentioned it upthread, but in the doc, where he's on Letterman and complaining that the London Symphony Orchestra came *this close* to getting it ... gtfo out, Frank. Like anything you throw at someone in the LSO is going to challenge them technically.

if he falls short who would know enough to know? except other mere snobs and nerds lol and who cares what nerds and snobs think!

anyway good quotes! one of the things i liked abt the alex winter doc is that it has interview footage from very close to the end of his life (when he knew his number was up and he was probably also in some pain). in the footage he is just less finally minded to keep up the pretence that actually he *doesn't* care and is *never* moved by *anything*: you get a glimpse of how very much it did matter

(but what cracks the facade and causes his i'm no mugg-mask to slip just a little is like, him dying! which seems doubly poignant!!)

wait i don't agree abt the LSO! even the most celebrated professional orchestras are sometimes p bad at the things FZ might be demanding of them

(such as extreme rhythmic precision)

that interview pretty much nails it, that smug dismissiveness I can give fucking stand

ugh can't stand

wait i don't agree abt the LSO! even the most celebrated professional orchestras are sometimes p bad at the things FZ might be demanding of them

Maybe! But I doubt it's because it's simply beyond their capabilities, it's probably because it's fucking stupid because it's *designed* to be a pain in the ass. It'd be like, I dunno, ELP crashing the LSO and saying "yeah, but can you do this!" and then playing a 20 minute drum solo, and a 30 minute organ solo and then a full-band chops-fest for an hour, and the LSO (those snobs!) would be, "um, no, probably not."

ok but he doesn't say it's "beyond their capability:" he says they came *this close* to getting it (which is why i think it's the rhythmic drag that's inherent to orchestral music that disappoints him) (i mean these days it could be ironed out with three weeks as opposed to three days rehearsal but he's never going to get the three weeks bcz that's not how the classical orchestra industry works)

tbf composers complaining about orchestras not performing their work correctly is pretty common! There so many things that can go wrong.

Tbf = To be...Frank?

Eh, orchestral players are trained in a particular repertoire and can be notoriously resistant to contemporary avant-garde music. Can't say about LSO in particular.3xp

Part of me has been itching to make a post about what album has "Wham! Bam! Gamelan!" on it.

I don't remember the exact quote, but sure, it could have simply been a matter of time. And Zappa, as was his wont, iirc also complained at length about their cost. If he wanted to get it "right" then, yes, go figure, it might have taken more time and money. But what a dick you have to be to write something designed to be challenging, fly out to London, hire (iirc) the b-listers (because they were cheaper), give them two days to record your ridiculous piece of music, and then complain on national tv that they came *this close* to capturing your genius. Better to just hire rock mutants to solo over ironic vamps.

(xp to self)
But that's the kind of pun FZ would probably not make, too obvious. His have to like broken crossword puzzle clues. Come to think of it, didn't Viv Stanshall have a whole album full of titles that were xword clues?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuqWElB8Ic

Zappa would title it something like "Gamelan Your Face." Or "Gamelan Hump." "Gamelan-a-Ding Dong."

They also may rehearse a new piece as a group just teo or three times, which I'm sure was fewer than Zappa was used to.xps

Two

Lol JiC

You could do a whole thread of those.

But if so, what was Zappa, modern composer, expecting? It's always someone else's fault. In that interview I posted he even complained that the *Synclaviar* couldn't get it.

Groening: And it seems that this technology is the answer to Frank Zappa's problem. Here it is exactly the way you want it to be performed.

Zappa:Well, even with the most perfect Synclavier performance, you still don't get 100%, because there are certain nuances that are going to be absent just because the music is being played by samples, which means every note will always be the same sound.

Ask Josh in Chicago to make up a Zappaesque song title containing a given word.

I don't remember the exact quote, but sure, it could have simply been a matter of time. And Zappa, as was his wont, iirc also complained at length about their cost. If he wanted to get it "right" then, yes, go figure, it might have taken more time and money. But what a dick you have to be to write something designed to be challenging, fly out to London, hire (iirc) the b-listers (because they were cheaper), give them two days to record your ridiculous piece of music, and then complain on national tv that they came *this close* to capturing your genius. Better to just hire rock mutants to solo over ironic vamps.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 27 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

That wasn't my impression. iirc he said the orchestra got like 80% of it without any anger, and he felt it was good enough to get a recording of it.

Zappa in interviews rarely seemed angry, imo, that's part of the smugness. What rubbed me the wrong way about the Letterman interview (again, just from memory, it was months ago) was his inability to just admit someone else did something right. As I remember it, they were talking about the LSO, and Letterman might have suggested that the LSO is pretty good, and Zappa conceded that they *were* good and got about 80% there (or whatever number it was). Which is ... still pretty backhanded!