Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

If I was gonna keep only one Zappa album (and I'd really only be keeping three or four, anyway), Hot Rats would be it, but honestly the actual contents don't seem all that exciting. Endless take after take after take of "Peaches en Regalia"? No additional versions of "The Gumbo Variations"? Plus, it seems like the original LP mixes are nowhere to be found, which is weird. Mmm, I don't know.

If I was gonna keep only one Zappa album (and I'd really only be keeping three or four, anyway), Hot Rats would be it, but honestly the actual contents don't seem all that exciting. Endless take after take after take of "Peaches en Regalia"? No additional versions of "The Gumbo Variations"? Plus, it seems like the original LP mixes are nowhere to be found, which is weird. Mmm, I don't know.

There was an announcement of the contents of this box put up accidently by the (third-party) reseller of Zappa products on zappa.com with an annotated track list. It was taken off quickly but was reposted on the forum on zappa.com. I read there's a 32-minute take of "Gumbo Variations", retitled as "Big Legs". They included the digital remix from 1987 as the 2012 cd version uses the original vinyl mix. And you can get that very cheaply. (Strangely, "Sharleena" from "The Lost Episodes" is not part of the box).

This teaser was posted too. Just a different mix it seems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HP5i4dxZP4

Well, Zappa's catalog is administered through Universal so this will go up on streaming services. All the other recent boxes have been on Spotify etc., so I'll check it out there. $125 is out of my price range.

This seems like it'll be a fun listen. Those "Hot Rats" ads are done by David Ossman and they're very cute.

The Lumpy Money and Meat Light boxes are fantastic in places, particularly the former. The original orchestral cues from Lumpy Gravy are a revelation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ief_Jcl0Pac

Hot Rats Sessions box now out and streaming.

Diving in now, starting with the 32-minute "Gumbo Variations" mentioned up above, which is indeed called "Big Legs" here.

Really interesting already in listening to FZ getting Ron Selico to loosen up, have fun, play lots more fills, and Selico approaching and finally nailing the drum intro on "Peaches."

not a huge Zappa fan, but I'm loving all these early takes of "Peaches" and the way you can hear the final version coming together

Enjoying this greatly, he really had to do a lot of work on Peaches to make it sound so tight.

an engrossing listen, as i figured it would be. the jams on the july 30 session are such fire. i guess i know why "sharleena" is absent from this - it was part of a later set of sessions for a never-completed "hot rats ii" album - this is the lineup with aynsley dunbar on drums that did some pickup live gigs around feb-march 1970. what went wrong there? the widely-circulated gig from the olympic is goddamn great, but then there was the mothers "reunion" and then flo and eddie showed up and don harris was in with harvey mandel and the pure food and drug act, which, you know, is some great shit that carries on the spirit of the jams, but it's a shame the hot rats thing fell apart like that because one gets the sense there were some real interesting paths zappa's career could've taken and as talented as volman and kaylan are, instead it was just endless songs about fucking groupies...

so what's the archie shepp recording of "shadow of your smile" zappa mentions as inspiring the title? live at donaueschingen?

Did he say he bought the Shepp song as a single? Must relisten.

I wrote about the box. Didn't love it as much as some of y'all, but got to dive into my feelings about Zappa more broadly.

Nice write-up... The paragraph about the Fun House box is funny.

for the record after listening to the whole thing i wound up keeping 25 tracks totalling more than 2 1/2 hours, which is a pretty good hit to miss ratio for a box like this as far as i'm concerned!

one of my favorite Zappa tunes ("Oh No") came up on shuffle the other day and I was pretty struck by the gulf between how brilliant the music was and how bad the lyrics are. and I don't mean bad in the usual way Zappa's lyrics are, he's actually trying to be pointed and biting here but it just comes off like "oh, you believe in LOVE? well guess what...you're stupid!". actually could be a direct quote. then I started to think about how many Zappa songs have legitimately good lyrics and I couldn't really come up with many, particularly post-Mothers

idk, i'm not sure it's that much worse than "give him a flower" by the crazy world of arthur brown

"well guess what...you're stupid!" pretty much sums up the gist of every Zappa song, including the instrumentals.

This is my go-to for 'Oh No' these days, most of the rest of the cues are fab too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ief_Jcl0Pac

He was very into writing what he might call anti love songs.

he was certainly inordinately proud of being an emotional cripple. a true independent thinker!

otm. his "hippies are a bunch of naïve dopes" schtick was never funny. the fact that he couldn't shut up about it is definitely weird / telling.

and i wouldn't call the music genius, it's just pretty good. "oh no" in particular reminds me of the demos tandyn almer was writing around the same time, which i like better anyway

my dad occasionally would recite a portion of “Montana” as he poured himself coffee

brewin it up
gulpin it down

"Any Way the Wind Blows" is the best tune he ever wrote.

That or "Jelly Roll Gum Drop".

"well guess what...you're stupid!" pretty much sums up the gist of every Zappa song, including the instrumentals.

I loled at this, even though there's more than a grain of truth to it. Some of those melodies are so ingrained in my brain since my early teens, though, I do love them. And the lyrics pretty much NEVER help. The other night I pulled out The Ed Palermo Big Band Plays The Music of Frank Zappa for the first time in years and found it really enjoyable. I'm more likely to put that on again soon than any of the two dozen Zappa LPs on my shelf.

In high school I had an English teacher who was huge into Zappa. he claimed a lot of his guitar god skills came from the fact that he had freakishly big hands. he was really big on Joe's Garage and loaned me his vinyl copy, which must've come out when he was 19 or 20. particularly the song "Catholic Girls", which he said should be our graduation song (I went to a Catholic school). I remember listening to it and just being like "what...the hell". This teacher wasn't a creep or anything as far as I knew, I think it had just been a long ass time since he listened to it. Anyway I finished the album and said to myself "I think I hate this guy". But I bought like 15 of his CDs after that.

It would be fine if that not-so-subliminal message were followed by 'and I am too!' but that never happens as far as I can tell.

xp

No, that absolutely never happens.

That would be infra dig.

Idk, as someone who loves the Beatles more than Zappa, I don't really think "Oh No" is lyrically dumber than the songs he was responding to.

i don't feel like that's the right way to frame it

How do you think it should be framed?

that basically just makes him Seth Macfarlane

zappa writes this sneering take-down of some hippie-era tunes as if john lennon had meticulously penned a political platform rather than write a song that expresses hope for a future of peace and mutual understanding. if anything zappa is "dumber" because in his creepy need to show his intellectual superiority he entirely misses the point. "actually, you DO need more than love! where are you going to sleep, huh? on love??"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNGR53wvRRI

Fwiw, at least one book cites Lennon as saying of "All You Need Is Love" as well as some of his solo songs: "I'm a revolutionary artist. My art is dedicated to change." And Harrison's "Within You Without You" contains the line "With our love, we could change the world if they only knew". These were p grandiose statements (and I like the songs!) and fair game to be poked at imo.

The Zappa song is not just literal pedantry imo. The song isn't saying "where are you going to sleep if all you need is love?", it's saying

You say love is all we need
You say with your love you can change
All of the fools, all of the hate

i.e. the problems are bigger than that

and

And in your dreams
You can see yourself as a prophet saving the world
The words from your lips
I just can't believe you are such a fool

which I think is a defensible riposte to the attitudes expressed. Not exactly Mark Twain but, as lyrics to a cool psych/prog track, I think they work.

God, analysing Frank Zappa's lyrics, has it come to this?

End times

I just asked myself the same question tbh. Clearly, I really hate doing taxes.xp

And admittedly Lennon could be p wry so the author there may have misread his tone idk.

I remember being impressed by the sheer volume of Zappa CDs in the racks in the '90s. It seemed to dwarf anything else that made it into your typical chain store in terms of an eccentric voice that bridged pop and art music. I had the impression that whole worlds were contained in all of those double- and triple-CDs, and the impression is fed by the cut-and-paste assembly of some of the Mothers albums. There was so much stuff in Uncle Meat! The fact that most of the music was instrumental did make me take seriously the claim (Zappa's, yes?) that the lyrics were a secondary concern.

I think there may be an argument for Zappa's use of vibrato on "Oh No" as a distancing effect—proclaiming "I can't be-lieeeeve in this quasi-operatic voice. Yes, Zappa was arrogant, but the music's utopianism lies in its tolerance for that arrogance, which is one of its elements rather than the whole of what it is. The tune sounds so wide-eyed, curious and aspirational! As well as vaguely orientalist (thus "naïve"). Maybe Zappa the guy with words can't just let it be that (although he does on Lumpy Gravy).

As much as anything else it was partly Zappa the guy with words that kept me from exploring those worlds on the post-1970 albums, and I'm not necessarily interested in the instrumental ones either—I do like some tunes—but I think these jarring contrasts, the sense that you were just getting these glimpses of worlds, was what made Zappa compelling. Maybe the twenty-first century doesn't have any need for those glimpses, jaundiced by Zappa's smut; maybe it needs real worlds, or failing that other ways of seeing and hearing.

Fwiw, at least one book cites Lennon as saying of "All You Need Is Love" as well as some of his solo songs: "I'm a revolutionary artist. My art is dedicated to change." And Harrison's "Within You Without You" contains the line "With our love, we could change the world if they only knew". These were p grandiose statements (and I like the songs!) and fair game to be poked at imo.

I heard it was you
Talkin' 'bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn't be
And only a fool would say that
The man in the street
Draggin' his feet
Don't want to hear the bad news
Imagine your face
There is his place
Standing inside his brown shoes
You do his nine to five
Drag yourself home half alive
And there on the screen
A man with a dream

i think there's a difference between lennon's sentiments on "all you need is love" and harrison's on "within you and without you" and i think they do both fall short in different ways.

lennon's faith in the power of love is unfalsifiable to the point of ridiculousness. "there's nothing you can do that can't be done" - this is sheer glurge. and while paul's "hey jude" may have a more interminable coda, "all you need is love" was there first.

"within you without you", otoh, is a frankly paranoid song, openly asking "are you one of them?"

i think both these forms of "love" are quite open to critical interrogation. zappa never provided an alternative to these flawed conceptions of "love", rejected the concept of love altogether, which imo rather diminishes the lasting value of his work, but it seems a fair enough criticism to me.

The age-old conundrum of how can one be positive without being a naive sucker or a hypocrite, often simply solved by resorting to cynical snark.

I think the misanthropic angle is a tad overplayed, and that FZ was just interested in exploring topics other than personal relationships, for which he deserves credit, not scorn. I certainly don't defend everything the man wrote but I'd much rather hear a song about spaceships landing in the Andes or turkey farmers in Lancaster or huskies pissing in snow than another goddamn song about someone's sweet darling baby doll and how much they're gonna wuv them fowever

inca roads is arguably not even the best prog-rock song about spaceships landing in the andes ("tenemos roads" is a strong competitor)

I think the misanthropic angle is a tad overplayed

careful paul, if you keep sniffing your own farts all day you're going to wake up with a bad goatee and a hard drive full of erotic ayn rand fanfic