Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

everyone’s like “Come on man, Frank Zappa is great you just haven’t listened to Greasy Stink House Yabazaba 😡 ”

— Jokermen (@JokermenPodcast) January 11, 2023

That's his best album besides Come Sit On My Dahoozawaza

I feel like I have seen at least three variations on this joke this week, must be something in the wazoo

me recalling zappa lyrics after having a stroke https://t.co/4ItsLzz47q

— boss crude (@bosscrood) January 13, 2023

Not that creative when Captain Beefheart has a song called Abba Zaba

ok here's something that's pretty crazy to me about Zappa's career

as you may know The Mothers' big break was when the producer Tom Wilson heard them play one song at a bar and signed them to Verve. that song, of course, was "Trouble Every Day", which made him think they were a white blues band who wrote political lyrics about societal justice.

anyway what's wild about that to me is that Zappa has such a unique sound and sensibility, one of his trademarks is you pretty much always know when you're hearing him no matter what genre he's doing. the LONE exception to that is "Trouble Every Day", which actually does sound like it could have been an amazing protest single by a completely different band. it's like, the only one of his songs that's actually played completely straight. and THAT'S what he got his first record deal on. what are the odds?

also one of his absolute best tho? certainly one of my very favorites, still relevant today which is quite a feat

The only Zappa song George Thorogood could have covered...and he did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT6DRjA8k7s

kinda makes me wonder what could've been had Zappa gotten signed earlier. he was 25 when Freak Out! was recorded which back then was fairly old for a debut album. for comparison Paul McCartney had done Sgt. Pepper when he was 25. Robert Fripp was recording King Crimson album #4. idk I think a version of Zappa who actually wasn't smirking 100% of the time could've been quite interesting

Might have sounded like this song he wrote in 1963, but is it entirely smirkless?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs1lvFBlY0U

There was a version of Trouble coming every day that Scott Turkey Bones of the Wild DEogs fame recorded with Chris Walsh of the Moodists and a few others. Never heard it but wonder if it still exists anywhere. Heard Scltt talk about it at the time which I think was before I'd become familiar with the original.
Think I had managed to pick up a compilation for a very reasonable price. & then only picked up a copy of Freakout when decent vinyl bootleg versions appeared a couple of years later.

//e.snmc.io/i/300/w/69dfe415126cd2fd489b380462444bd4/2346601
was my introduction to the band I think.

Picked up the lps by the early version of the band when I found them on cd about a decade later. & again when they were remastered mid 00s.

Might have sounded like this song he wrote in 1963, but is it entirely smirkless?

Wow, I’d never heard this… wild meta doo-wop song.

decided to torrent a copy of the SNL episode he hosted because hey, curiosity got the better of me. holy hell is it bad. I mean the sketches themselves aren't really funny but Zappa himself comes off like such a dickhead. he has the energy of a high school kid acting in the school play, who very much wants people to know he does not like the play nor any of the people involved. he delivers every line and movement in such an overly sarcastic way that it's kind of a wonder they didn't just tell him to go home. again, the jokes are not particularly funny, but he seems to go out of his way to make them even less funny somehow. he also mentions the cue cards like a dozen times. so there you go, I watched it so you don't have to (none of you were gonna watch it anyway)

That episode is considered one of the biggest disasters from the early SNL days, in a storied class alongside Louise Lasser & Milton Berle.

I remember seeing an edit of that Zappa ep on Nick At Nite a weekend or two after he died.

crosspost from the John Cale thread, I found the quote posted in there pretty interesting:

John Cale: They took the piss out of us. The guys on the trip, somebody had been very inconsiderate and painted an emblem on our door with a gravestone that said "RIP Velvet Underground" on it, and they were laying in wait. Andy [Warhol] was such an incredible generator of publicity that they all wanted...the only reason Zappa was on those gigs was that Herb Cohen knew that he'd get all this publicity from Andy and us. The thing is about Frank, that was reinforced years after I saw him, is that he had a very acerbic wit, which was kind of enjoyable, but at the same time, I really can't say there was anything about his music or him that made me love music. There was something about him, I think it was a real deep-seeded anger and fury about being forced to learn music in the first place - there was a revenge factor there - but it made me very uncomfortable watching him. There was so much putting down of himself that wasn't pleasant. I lost the gleam of innocence that you get from somebody really enjoying a melody or a solo or anything like that. And he could rip off [play, not pilfer] all these incredible solos, and you knew the guy had tremendous talent, but there was never anything there that made me love music so I'd want to do it. The reason you're doing this is to show how people how exciting and enjoyable this is. It's a shared experience. People shouldn't be punished for sharing an experience.

I'd never really thought of Zappa in that way, someone who happened to be very good at something he wasn't all that invested in. It reminds me of certain poker players who are really great at the game and make a lot of money playing but, when pressed, admit they don't really enjoy it that much, that it's just something that lines up really well with their skill set so they do it because what else are they gonna do? Waste that talent? I think maybe that explains why his records are so reluctant to ever hang on a great moment, or to feel anything deeply, or even really be all that coherent. It's like he was afraid people would think he was putting too much time into trying to appeal to an audience. A lot of the stuff he does seems like it was designed to be deliberately unappealing, particularly in terms of his album covers, many of which are ugly collages or uncomfortable close-ups of his face. He stumbles upon a lot of really great stuff but almost seems embarrassed by it, which is why many of his best songs are so short (relative to the rest of his work), and why a lot of his best moments are just suddenly clipped off by something stupid.

But I also think this is what makes him so fascinating, because a lot of times you feel like he was trying to come up with something that was interesting to him, which led to him doing a lot of real far out things most other musicians would never attempt. Like all the sped up impossible shit on those Mothers albums.

I'd never really thought of Zappa in that way, someone who happened to be very good at something he wasn't all that invested in.

Now, see, that's exactly why I've never been able to get into Zappa. He's so steeped in arrogance as a form of insecure deflection. It's why so many of his genre exercises are smug and ironic, since it's easier to play a half-assed version of something with a wink than do it in earnest and fail in public, because you don't have the chops to hang with real jazz players/composers/pop songwriters/whomever. If you create your own musical world/circus - which he did - then any success you have is on your own terms, but it also protects you from embarrassing yourself. Though he did plenty of that, too.

pitchfork review is good but doesn't make him or his music sound any more appealing to me. I wonder if a backlash to the backlash is brewing or if it just represents a sort of last gasp for zappa fandom

like other people on this thread over the years I'm interested in him as a cultural figure and fascinated by the level of visceral contempt and repulsion I feel towards him and his music - which I suspect is somewhat excessive even with the plenty of good reasons to dislike him detailed in this thread. he's much easier to avoid than other artists I dislike (e.g. drake) but somehow he pisses me off much more. I don't know what's behind it exactly but I wonder if I recognise some of my own worst instincts in his hatefulness and anality

(my anality is more in the expulsive direction but if I had a lot more discipline and compositional talent I might end up making music that sounds too much like his and that frightens me a little)

The review was interesting — both as a piece, and just the fact that it exists. JFH was one of the first two things I bought on CD, because I figured it would really demonstrate the advantages of crystal-clear digital sound over LPs and cassettes and if I was gonna pay inflated prices I wanted it to make a difference in what I heard, and it did. But I haven't actually listened to it in decades. In my memory, it was like proto-Autechre or something, and I could still see mixing "G-Spot Tornado" into "Second Bad Vilbel," but now that I'm listening to it this morning, a lot of it sounds like gross '80s fusion of the Chick Corea Elektric Band school. Also, it's a lot shorter than I remembered — only 35 minutes.

someone who happened to be very good at something he wasn't all that invested in

I'm sure he was deeply invested in (his idea of good) music, he didn't spend hours every day writing notes on paper, editing tape or programming Synclavier out of resentment. Touring, maybe he did resent sometimes. His issue was that he couldn't trust anyone's emotional response to music - even his own response, which is why he spent so much time making fun of the doo-wop which, at the same time, he said he loved (and did, in his way).

I've always assumed his misogyny was based on his high school (and post) life, where he couldn't get any traction with "the ladies" and resented them for it. And that spread to hating all the "Chads" as well, incel style. He's never really written a love song, besides the doo-wop pastiches as noted above, where I can't tell if he's embracing them or mocking them.

I think Cale is right about Zappa to some extent but he's wrong about him being "forced to learn music", he mostly taught himself I believe? Because he REALLY wanted to learn music.

... well that's what he claimed anyway.

Yeah, I think he loved music, Partly because of the opportunity it gave him to feel superior to the crowd.

He forced HIMSELF to learn music!

Feel like doo-wop was one of the few things he liked enough that it actually survived his pastiches in such a way that something like love shone through.

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

I've always assumed his misogyny was based on his high school (and post) life, where he couldn't get any traction with "the ladies" and resented them for it. And that spread to hating all the "Chads" as well, incel style. He's never really written a love song, besides the doo-wop pastiches as noted above, where I can't tell if he's embracing them or mocking them.

lol

Wait what is that?

it's interesting that both Lou Reed and Zappa loved doo wop so much

though Lou loved music deeply and the emotion behind it, he was the opposite of Zappa in that respect, even his worst music seemed to come from a place of deep belief

Paul Simon too. Didn’t he and Lou exchange doo wop tapes at one point?

PIPCO

?

There was so much putting down of himself that wasn't pleasant.

that's the thing of it. some people have a lot of internalized self-loathing. a lot of artists. lou reed, you know, he had a lot of that. a lot of artists externalize it - i mean, _take no prisoners_, right? zappa just had this continuous "smart mark" attitude about him. how many songs did he write? and not _one_ love song among them? man who refuses on principle to ever express love through music leaves behind corpus of throughly unloveable music, film at 11.

He also loved to complain about cliched chord changes iirc.

Watermelon in Easter Hay is the one Zappa song that registers some emotion but it's stuck in the ugliness of Joe's Garage and he hedges his bets with the dumb Grand Scrutinizer jive at the beginning, also, tellingly, an instrumental

Ha, that one always seems to get trotted out as Exhibit Z.

Zappa's purest and most emotionally exposed music is on the Guitar compilation. Even the original Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar trilogy had a lot of stunt-work and gimmickry, but the solos on Guitar were sliced directly out of concert tapes and presented without overdubbing.

idk i think “village of the sun” has some kind of emotional register too

How about "Dog Breath Variations" from Uncle Meat (and the equally beautiful version on The Yellow Shark) as Exhibit ZZ?

Absolutely love that one. Nostalgia might be his truest feeling

this continuous "smart mark" attitude about him

wait whut?

my observation here is that i played abt three quarters of JFH last night and it mostly reminded me of the i claudius theme music as re-performed by a marc hollander outfit (i.e. not awful but i will not be tripping over myself to study it any time soon)

my other observation is that the guitar solos in many zappa pieces seem to be the null spot where the tension entirely evaporates: i wd kind of handwave this as "lol that's modal scales for you, pal" and let you pick the bones out of it but it's not like i'm gnna do the homework to see whether the ones i have in mind actually ARE modal, so

by "in mind" i mean "i have often noticed this in the past" -- if you ask me which i mean i will not remember so i guess "no longer in mind" also works

Trouble in Mind.

Oh wait this is a Zappa thread so it probably should be a bad pun like Treble in Mind.

I love that zappa discourse will always lure mark s - I'm the same way in my mind though I don't always actually jump in - he is a fascinating figure, in his steadfast insistence on carving emotional engagement out of music while playing in groups -- he wants to do what improvisational ensembles do but also wants to dictate the terms, it's a deeply contradictory proposition. the melodies and harmonies that define him are totally out of his doo-wop love, but that love is or wants to claim to be entirely technical (fine distinctions in style are the joy of getting into doo wop, what to the Hartford groups do that the Detroit groups don't do, why is LA technique so different from Harlem) while the genre is 100% sentimental at all times & is nostalgic even when it's new ("Those Oldies But Goodies"). "Watermelon" is for sure a solo that feels like it comes from somewhere deeper but there's playing in a lot of the live stuff that feels like it's in the same zone, it's just that the milieu suffocates the expression. If down to one sentence: Zappa is not sure how he feels about pleasure, but if pressed, he's very suspicious of it.

Zappa and the Gang of Four in anti-love song solidarity

It’s his factory.