Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

Maybe thats a good way to go about it. I used to work with a dude that owned everything he ever did, wish I still did so I could just borrow a random stack.

FZ the composer rewards deep and repeated listening, FZ the lyricist and misanthrope doesn't (with a couple of rare exceptions). This album, FZ played on Baroque instruments by Ensemble Ambrosius, is really good:

http://open.spotify.com/album/40I3p7zHU7waQwZABZoiPr

i've come around to zappa a bit, but it seems like everytime i'm hearing some truly amazing superhuman music in comes some "funny" fake doo-wop or a dude with a mexican accent saying thing

Zappa in a nutshell

i've come around to zappa a bit, but it seems like everytime i'm hearing some truly amazing superhuman music in comes some "funny" fake doo-wop or a dude with a mexican accent saying thing

Yeah, I've got a soft spot for that kind of puerile genre-bending.

When it comes to FZ, sometimes the smarm can charm, but it will just as often harm.

Sometimes both in the same song.

Listening to this for the very first time, and grinning like an idiot. The side of Roxy and Elsewhere containing "Echidna" is one of my favorites, and this nails it beautifully. Thanks, WmC!

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

Agreed with most of the above - Uncle Meat is such a frustrating album for exactly this reason. You can hear so much brilliance on there, but its also the point where he feels the need to ruin every beautiful thing he ever wrote with goofy vocals or terrible instrumentation or boring snippets of dialogue - I dig dudes that try to challenge their audience, but I feel like FZ just did it for its own sake. "Dog Breath" would be such an amazing composition if they just did it somewhat straight!!

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My pleasure! That Ambrosius album is just gorgeous, but some days I think Music by Frank Zappa by the Omnibus Wind Ensemble is even better. Too bad it's not on Spotify, but here is a short playlist of four of the pieces -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkgEFFBj6mc&feature=BFa&list=PL4F6D5A18F6CE6BAA

Inca Roads/Uncle Meat/No. 7/Black Page #2

Uncle Meat is a perfect album, imo, incl the lyrics and vocals.

Yep, I love Uncle Meat to death. Sprawling, yeah, but wonderful. I just watched this for the first time; I don't know anything about the Token Of His Extreme DVD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PewnFHIHzM

Uncle Meat is definitely one of my favorites too, don't really see how it's ruined

I think my favorite FZ, in terms of writing, performance & production is Inca Roads

I think my main problem with Zappa is that his jokes aren't funny

What about the snorks?

Lots of them were up until about 74.

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dunno what compelled Zappa to rip off the Smurfs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuCq0aZiPT0

"Ruben Sano was 19 when he quit the group to work on his car" = funny

Lots of them were up until about 74.

Bingo, though I did like some of the bizarre robo-sex scenes in Joe's Garage for their pure bizarreness

my drummer's impression of FZ in the studio for this track: "Come on, Roy - sing that way we all hate":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hjU2GCKx4g

Man, that clip cracks me up. Grinning from ear to ear.

Lots of them were up until about 74.

― I wish to incorporate disco into my small business (chap),

OTM. I think the mid-70s turning point was the break with Herb Cohen and the beginning of Endless Grief with Warner Bros., which pushed him the rest of the way into total humanity-hatred. (The first push being his "obscenity" bust at Studio Z.) His lyrics never carried much fond regard from the beginning, but they really seemed to start being etched in acid from about '76-77. I wonder what kind of person he would have turned out as if not for those two events.

Getting knocked offstage/seriously injured in Montreaux couldn't've helped either

Did he ever voice an opinion re:"Smoke On The Water"?

Early Zappa: Freak Out!, Absolutely Free, We're Only In It For the Money and Lumpy Gravy are still my favorites. Love that OG Mothers band. First time I ever heard "Absolutely Free" I was 100% in love, tho I never found anything else by FZ that equaled it for me. I think "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" is his peak, and "Duke of Prunes" and the accompanying suite/psych freak-out/Stravinsky quotes is probably the best thing he's ever done. I worshiped this stuff in high school.

Late 60's/Early 70's Zappa: Feels like most of this is culled from live performances, live experiments, etc. You can probably just watch "200 Motels" and get the gist of what he was going for with this. Love that movie, and some of the songs are really wonderful, ironic 70's stoner rock jams. Flo & Eddie are great additions to the band!

70's Zappa: More live stuff, studio experiments. Lots of great stuff, most of it depending on how much you enjoy comedy fusion jazz. First time I ever heard "Sheik Yerbouti" I really hated it, but every time after that I totally loved it. Probably for this reason I haven't really delved into too much else from this era. The Terry Bozzio stuff on that album owns.

80's Zappa: Don't know anything past "You Are What You Is", which has some great 80's-relevant social commentary. Anti-right wing, anti-war, anti-Mud Club, anti-religious right, etc.

Alas, my heart lies with the 60's stuff.

Does anyone else love Apostrophe?

I LOVE Apostrophe.

My heart lies with the post- Flo and Eddie/ pre- disillusionment years. Say, 72-77.

I'm kind of cool to Apostrophe. It's ok, but way down my personal ranking of his albums. (I should actually do that ranking sometime.)

Getting knocked offstage/seriously injured in Montreaux couldn't've helped either

― Race Against Rockism (Myonga Vön Bontee), Thursday, June 14, 2012 3:05 PM

This was in London, a week after Montreux, but yeah -- destruction of all the band's gear and nearly being killed by a drunk within a few days had to be another horrible low point.

Jesus, I knew about the gear/casino fire thing, but hadn't heard about the accident. I'd be pretty pissed off at my "fans" after those two incidents too!

only album i love beyond 60s Mothers stuff is Apostrophe, this is almost entirely down to hearing it as a kid tho via neighbours parents

The version of WOIIFTM that I first heard was the one with the new bass and drums, so for a long time I thought that was the original version. When I finally heard the real original I was quite shocked at the difference. I still hear the altered one as being the "right" one even though I know that's not right.

I finally tracked down the 80's version of this album and it's blowing my mind; WOIIFTM is still one of my absolute favorite albums ever and it has been for like a decade, so hearing a completely new version of it is nearly surreal (seems like more than just the bass and drums was remixed). I'm not sure if I really like it, though I'll admit the production on the original was pretty terrible.

I poked around on YouTube a little last night and really fell for "Montana".

Awesome article on Zappa here, mostly about "Watermelon in Easter Hay":

http://www.furious.com/perfect/zappainstrumentals.html

I think it really reflects what I meant when I say he "ruins" his own work, but he puts it a lot less harshly. Still, very interesting (and long!)

I finally tracked down the 80's version of this album and it's blowing my mind; WOIIFTM is still one of my absolute favorite albums ever and it has been for like a decade, so hearing a completely new version of it is nearly surreal (seems like more than just the bass and drums was remixed). I'm not sure if I really like it, though I'll admit the production on the original was pretty terrible.

― frogbs, Friday, June 15, 2012 2:10 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've heard both, and there are bits that I prefer on both versions. Like on the '80s version, there were things that were edited out of the '60s version that I like: like the "I get to work with the Velvet Underground, who are just as shitty a group as Frank Zappa's group" part and the 'missing' verse to 'Mother People' ("shut your fuckin' mouth about the length of our hair" etc.)

There's that bit on 'Harry, You're A Beast' at the end where it goes "don't come in me, in me, don't come in me, in me" that's uncensored on the later version, but I actually think it worked better with all that baskmasking and tape-editing when he censored it for the original version... not for any prudish reasons, just that I think the effect is really fucking neat! (Especially on headphones)!

I have to think the Studio Z experience was a huge marker on the way Zappa's career went after that point. I'd figure the fact that the local cops pretty much just set him up and destroyed his studio business probably set him on the path he went.

That doesn't happen and he stayed in the studio business, things perhaps would have went very different. Frank Zappa might have ended up with a career path like say David Axelrod or maybe some kind of low rent Jerry Goldsmith, getting more into production and sound track work.

It was his "as God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again" moment.

I actually wouldn't be totally surprised if Gail included streaming rights in the Universal deal! I could see arguments both ways, for including and for withholding. Actually the smart way to do it would be to allow Spotify/streaming for each album one year after its CD release.

Awesome article on Zappa here, mostly about "Watermelon in Easter Hay":

http://www.furious.com/perfect/zappainstrumentals.html

I think it really reflects what I meant when I say he "ruins" his own work, but he puts it a lot less harshly. Still, very interesting (and long!)

Yeah, enjoyed reading that, thanks frogbs. I'm a fairly casual Zappa fan but I totally agree with the guy's conclusion about picking and choosing from the back catalogue. With that in mind I really hope it all ends up on iTunes eventually - 'Watermelon in Easter Hay' is one of my favourite songs of all time but I've zero interest in hearing the rest of Joe's Garage.

I used to read a bunch of those personal review sites and it was always funny how the authors would start out super excited about reviewing Zappa and would just pour out all this emotion on how great he was, then once they hit Sheik Yerbouti or so it just seemed like all the life was sucked out of them. Here's an excerpt that I liked:

Frank Zappa was a guy who simply couldn't shut up. He was like a kid who'd just gotten a tape recorder and spent every second of every day putting down anything that popped into his head, thinking it was hilariously genius and needed not only to be preserved on magnetic tape forever, but also played back to friends, relatives, milkmen, random passers-by, and anyone else within earshot. The guy who was forever recording his farts, or trying to create an electric guitar out of an old transistor radio, a roll of aluminum foil, and sbout fifteen gallons of solder, or singing showtunes in some Looney Tunes voice and cracking up like he'd just given a wedgie to the Pope or something. You know, not the class clown, but the dude not even the freaks and weirdos could understand. It was exactly this childish inability to color within the lines and self-edit that both sealed Frank Zappa's commercial failure and formed an unbreakable bond with a certain group of insane fanatics who hung on his every note. The man attracts and repulses with equally irresistible force - The man's a master guitar player who often spends too much time talking to actually play. He writes extraordinarily complex music that often just comes across like a poorly organized in-joke. He's never met a musical form he didn't try to master, from free-jazz to doo wop to modern classical to electronic music, and he's never met a musical form he didn't then try to wad up into a little Zappa ball, filtered through his perverse sensibilities and stripped of most of what made it distinct in the first place. He's diverse stylistically, but a whole lot of his stuff sounds EXACTLY THE SAME AS ITSELF.

Frank Zappa's commercial failure

Stopped reading at this phrase. If chart hits is this reviewer's main metric, then fuck him for that. If it's not, then he doesn't really know much about FZ, so fuck him for that. FZ was financially secure enough to build his own state of the art studio and release pretty much whatever he felt like, so

maybe you should have kept reading if you really wanted to know why the guy has his problems with Zappa? not sure how you arrived at that conclusion

The only conclusion I reached was "fuck this guy" for either not understanding or for misrepresenting what commercial success or failure means in re: FZ. I didn't address whatever critical problems he has the work, and have no beef with that.

...problems he has WITH the work...

Yeah, commercial failure. If only he had a hit record he coulda been a success. Instead he self-released like over 50 LPs. What a loser.

well, it's a 50-page long article. certianly "commercial failure" isn't really intended as a criticism; he's just mentioning the consequences of not self-editing at all. that's just a small part of the overall point here which is that Zappa was a brilliant man who thought he was even more brilliant than he actually was, and the work (especially post-1971) suffers as a result

Well, I finally bought one.

I got a copy of "Freak Out", a UK 'original pressing of the double LP' (as opposed to the real original which was a single LP, I know..)

Anyway, first track, it's Northern Soul! Wasn't expecting that.

freak out is great

Not sure if "Northern Soul" is accurate.

You don't think it has something of the "Going to a go-go" about it? (The Sharonettes version)