Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

After all the recent “Zappa is an asshole” posts I’ve been listening to a ton of FZ, trying to reconnect with what attracted me to his music in the first place, and discover which parts are still relevant to me.

I first heard him via a friend’s older brother’s 60s LPs, and while the “smut” and the weirdness were probably initial draws for a pre-teen, so were the odd melodies of “Take Your Clothes Off” and “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black” and “Dog Breath.” I don’t return to the earliest records often, but still appreciate their diverse influences and groundbreaking sound collages when I do.

The Flo & Eddie years are difficult for me. I certainly spent enough time listening to “Billy the Mountain” and watching midnight showings of 200 Motels but the comedy and the vulgarity overshadow the music here, and I’m rather embarrassed that a record containing “Magdalena” is still on my shelf.

It’s great that the vulgar comedy completely disappears for Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo and I like those records fine, but I don’t listen to the instrumental records much, either jazz or classical, including Hot Rats.

I’ve determined it’s the mid-70s band that still holds the most appeal and interest for me. The humor is still there, although somewhat less sexual and more absurdist. With the addition of George Duke and Chester Thompson (and sometimes Jean Luc Ponty) they become a ridiculously well-rehearsed jazz fusion band, with stop-on-a-dime tempo changes and the always-incredible Ruth Underwood layering the “cartoon music” on top. “Echidna’s Arf” and “Inca Roads” are still amazing pieces of music to me, and I love when this band reworks an oldie like “King Kong.”

I somehow had never seen The Roxy Movie until this past weekend, and it’s amazing, a great antidote for all the “angry Zappa” typecasting. Watching his hand-movements conducting, or his little dance moves, or his scampering over to play percussion, he seemed genuinely happy at that point.

After that it’s rapidly diminishing returns. I didn’t like most of Sheik Yerbouti or the Joe’s Garage trilogy, and heard only bits and pieces after that. I may investigate some more 80s records as part of my research, but I don’t hold high hopes.

Mid 70s bootlegs though, bring 'em on!

i had the opposite response to The Roxy movie... one of my fav records ever and I had it pictured in my head how it looked etc. once I saw the live footage of Bebop Tango and saw Frank just like tossing a woman around the stage with such distain it turned me off! he was happy, and that band cooked, sure, but he still hated woman and Napoleon Brock turned out to be a creep so that is a deterrent too.

Agreed, "Bebop Tango" is the worst, half an hour of audience participation bullshit which could have been excised for some of the songs that made the box set but not the movie.

have you heard the roxy sessions box? thats where all the gold is.

Haven't bought it but I've heard a bunch of it, yes. Actually today I was listening to a bootleg recorded in my hometown, slightly after the Helsinki shows on You Can't Do That... Vol. 2. Interesting to hear the songs without the overdubs and embellishments that went onto Roxy & Elsewhere. Lots of different arrangements and ad libs, lots of fun.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zappa+st+paul+1974

one thing that came to mind listening to Zappa's output from the Flo & Eddie period onward is that he blew a lot of his talent doing South Park-level shit; both the endless toilet humor and the whole "fuck you, if you don't like this then the next one's gonna be even worse" attitude. not to mention always posturing himself as the smartest guy in the room. trouble is he's much less funny than Parker & Stone and when he makes me laugh it's almost by accident. now when I hear something like "Uncle Fucker" I think "ahh, this is what Frank was trying to do"

(obviously this doesn't apply to everything he did from 1970 on but that general attitude is all over the place on those records)

One thing that actually did make me laugh in that St. Paul bootleg is they changed the chorus of "Oh No" from "I just can't believe you are such a fool" to "I just can't believe you go arf arf arf," which is utterly silly and stupid, but it made me lol.

could you imagine an entire album of shit like tell me you love me and magic finger? shit would be one of the best rock records ever. turtle power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTyrcCuB55Q

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

this is sick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVn33X-OpM8

100% sincere, i would like a zappa fan to break down the humor in the "200 motels" film

There isn't any. Some of the music is good though.

Yeah, it's absurdist, and absurd =/= funny.

It feels like so often I try again with an unfamiliar, to me, album and it's like one step forward and two steps back. Like I recently played through all of Just Another Band for the first time ever, I thought "Billy the Mountain" was actually a decent absurdist take on the side-long prog epic and I appreciated where he was going with that one. But then "Magdalena" came on and just, yeah, that's just indefensible smut that doesn't serve any "social commentary" or anything...

xp

I was thinking "surreal", but yeah, absurdist works too. The film's primary idea is that "touring makes you crazy", and it comes off like one big, disassociative episode.

Cmon George Duke saying "I carry a copy of downbeat magazine in my back pocket so cats will think I know what's happening" is funny. Also Keith Moon as a vacuum.

The vacuum story line comes from a piece called "The Pleated Gazelle." Some of that was used for 200 Motels.

SHE HAD A TERRIBLE FIGHT WITH HER OLD BOY FRIEND ONE NIGHT. SHE TOLD HIM TO GO AWAY AND BEAT HIM WITH A PLASTIC FISH. SHE ATE SOME VIENNA SAUSAGES TO CALM DOWN. THEN SHE MET A NEWT RANCHER . . . A YOUNG LAD WHO RAISED NEWTS SO RICH PEOPLE COULD HAVE COATS MADE OUT OF THEM. SHE LOVED HIM A LOT, AND THEY STARTED SHACKING UP ON THE RANCH WHERE HE GREW THE NEWTS. EVERYTHING WAS FINE EXCEPT HE WAS IN LOVE WITH AN INDUSTRIAL VACUUM CLEANER . . .

Absurdist in the extreme, but yeah I guess funny if you're in the right mood.

it certainly has funny elements (if you like that kind of thing), but there's a strong undercurrent of nightmarish paranoia running throughout

honestly the Mad Libs component to his lyrics often pisses me off more than the outright hateful shit

lol I never made the Mad Libs comparison, but now I will never think of his lyrics in the same way again.

Kurt, thanks for that Audioactive mix, it's pretty interesting. It confirms my belief that the sound of his band, especially his guitar, is much less to my tastes by the 80s. I liked the 1984 "reggae" arrangement of "King Kong" though.

PO4:
Willie the pimp
Peaches
Uncle Remus
You’re probably wondering why I’m here

Not really but tell us anyway.

How’d I miss the Mad Libs thing before? That’s right on target.

The (adjective) (noun)

The Pleated Gazelle

HAHAHA I am so hilarious.

You fool! I wasn’t actually trying to be funny, just mocking those morons who think THEY themselves are funny, DO U SEE?

the entire first album by vril (the bob drake surf project, not the nazi vril) has song titles in this format:

https://www.discogs.com/release/2524059-Vril-Effigies-In-Cork

Add an article to the beginning and “The Preening Docent” could also be an Edward Gorey book.

Mark Leyner wrote [writes?] in that Mad Lib style, which I found utterly unbearable at novel length.

Everything, including the vault and FZ's name and likeness, sold to Universal. https://www.billboard.com/pro/frank-zappa-song-publishing-catalogs-universal-music-group-archive/

Also, last year Lady Gaga sold the Laurel Canyon house that included the UMRK. I wonder who owns it now.

Hold on aren't Universal the company that lost shitloads of literally irreplaceable recordings in a fire?

They're going to replace everybody else's lost masters with Zappa guitar solos and hope no-one's the wiser.

xxpost to self, Lizzy Jagger bought the house.

xp LOL

so the entire Zappa family – Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva – is thrilled to pass the baton to the new forever stewards for all things Frank Zappa

This is the part I was wondering about.

New Zappa releases are much like the Grateful Dead model.

Vaultmeister Joe finds some nice tapes, Ahmet green lights it and they put a cool box out, it's well-considered and lines of communication with the fans' needs are healthy.

But unless someone is planning to reboot all the classic albums (again), I don't see it making much money as opposed to ticking over nicely.

Zappa Night on the next season of American Idol.

Hold on aren't Universal the company that lost shitloads of literally irreplaceable recordings in a fire?

― Eavis Has Left the Building (Tom D.)

oh no i will mourn the priceless loss of thousands of live recordings of "the illinois enema bandit", frank zappa's song about how all college-educated women deserve to be sexually assaulted

thousands because he played it at _every single concert from 1976 on_ even though i have never heard anybody else in the entire world ever have a good thing to say about it

Zappa's catalog is absolutely filled with hateful misogyny and horrifying winks and nots endorsing sexual assault, so I sure as fuck don't want to defend the guy on this count, but that song is written from the POV of an actual, real life criminal.

Which isn't to defend the choice of him playing the awful song all the damn time, but that particular song is really not that much worse than, say, 60% of Slayer's catalog.

Zappa's catalog is absolutely filled with hateful misogyny and horrifying winks and nots endorsing sexual assault, so I sure as fuck don't want to defend the guy on this count

this is not a put-down. this is a serious question. it's not a question i want an answer to - in fact i'd prefer it if you _didn't_ give me an answer to it - but it's a question which i would like you to, if you feel comfortable, ask yourself.

if you didn't want to, why did you? would some great wrong have been committed if you had chosen to remain silent on this point?

I think "writing a song from the POV of an actual criminal" falls into the category of imitative fallacy.

I think "writing a song from the POV of an actual criminal" falls into the category of imitative fallacy.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

it's certainly worth comparing zappa's account of kenyon's crimes to the account henry threadgill gave to nat hentoff, should one be so interested

truthfully, my interest in this song in particular lies more in the fact that i experience this song very differently now, as a college-educated woman, than i did when i first encountered the song, when i was _not_ a college-educated woman. this isn't necessarily a routine experience listeners have with the song, but i do believe it to be a valuable perspective nevertheless.

I suppose the comparison maybe interesting (?), but Zappa really has nothing worthwhile to say on this subject.

also "Illinois" is 3rd person, not from the POV of the bandit? like literally that is not what that song is.

I suppose the comparison maybe interesting (?), but Zappa really has nothing worthwhile to say on this subject.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

oh god i'm not saying _zappa's_ perspective is worthwhile i'm talking about _my_ perspective lol

Yeah, my post was totally unnecessary and pointless, sorry rushomancy. I also very much incorrectly recalled the POV of the lyrics, hadn't heard the song for many, many years.

fwiw I get it, I mean I remember "Jumbo Go Away" putting me off Zappa for a while and then coming back and thinking "ok, I probably just missed the joke, or misread the tone or something" then listening to it again and realizing it was even worse than I remembered

its frustrating because Zappa is (IMO) a smart & articulate person in general, and arguably a musical genius, which I think is why he got off so much on writing stuff like he's Andrew Dice Clay. I can see the appeal in something like that. But what gets me is there's just so little cleverness to it, it all feels so unsubtle and beneath him that I have to believe he's every bit the pig he tried to convince people he was. He tries to play both sides in a way that's so transparent that it kind of ruins everything about him. He was in his mid-30s when he wrote "Enema Bandit"!! and (as rush mentioned) he played it over and over and over again!

oh god i'm not saying _zappa's_ perspective is worthwhile i'm talking about _my_ perspective lol

No, I got that, but you were talking about comparing his take to Threadgill/Hentoff's.

The often indefensible, casual misogyny still remains a huge stumbling block for me so I find myself mostly returning to stuff like Hot Rats or the instrumental stuff most often.

So here's something I just thought about: Now that Frank Zappa's...everything (music released and otherwise, videos, *likeness*)...has been sold to Universal by the family, will there be an attempt to kind of integrate him into "classic rock" and scrub away his decades of fringe weirdo status?

Probably, and some attempt to solidify his image as the rock musician who "really understood" jazz fusion and classical.

one of the things that bugs me a lot about zappa these days is how _proud_ he was of being uneducated. bragged about having one semester of college and never having learned anything else about composition since then. i mean, i'm not putting him down for what he was, but compare that to, say, dirk campbell of egg and national health, who decided to really study composition in-depth when aaron copland criticized "long piece no. 3" for its lack of thematic development, resulting in works like "enneagram" and "zabaglione". (unfortunately the final version of "zabaglione", which is utterly brilliant, was never professionally recorded and exists only on a shitty-quality bootleg tape of campbell's last gig with the band)