Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

The strange thing about Zappa is that his juvenalia is his least juvenile work.

I may have posted this upthread but Zappa is truly the ultimate love / hate proposition for me, and I realize I'm not alone here. Saying "I wish all of his albums were instrumental" is almost a cliche at this point (see: Shut Up & Play Your Guitar, etc) but I am firmly in this camp. I love the hell out of Hot Rats, (most of) Apostrophe, (half of) Roxy, and parts of others, but always wish I liked his albums more than I do. I like the early albums fine but they veer more toward novelty to me (I'm including everything up to Reuben here), like above-average wacky psych pop, but not really the sort of thing I reach for.

That said, I expect I will have a "Zappa phase" at some point in my life. There's just so much good shit mixed in with so much dumb scatological nonsense.

A "Non-Wacky Zappa S&D" would be most welcome

I came here to chime in on that same note!

I’d always loathed Frank Zappa based on his persona and the Dr. Demento style songs that he seems to be best known for (?). I didn’t even know Zappa made any non-“novelty” music until Blessed Relief came up on a Spotify playlist. I like it, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to be taking it at face value, or reading it as some kind of veiled dig at Chuck Mangione and smooth jazz in general.

Are the first couple records a good place to start? I too just can't stand the persona and what I've heard but the Mothers of Invention records are liked by so many people

the first couple of records tend to get more liked because one gets the sense from them that zappa hadn't entirely given up on humanity at that point (though he was getting there) and have some moments of sincere and unaffected emotion (see, for instance, the bridge of "what's the ugliest part of your body"). but it's not as if that album is a wacky-free zone by any means.

anyway there's another thread for non-wacky zappa but i don't remember where it is right now.

First album is ok, the songs don't really fall in the novelty category. 2nd album has a terrific first side but also has the yucky "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," a tender ode to being tired of one's wife and fantasizing about fucking a 13-year-old girl instead. Of the original Mothers-era records, I recommend going in this order:

1. Uncle Meat
2. We're Only In It for the Money
3. Burnt Weeny Sandwich
4. Weasels Ripped My Flesh
5. Ahead of Their Time (released 1993, recorded Oct. 1968; half chamber music and not the worst comedy, half Mothers performance)
6. Cruising with Ruben and the Jets
7. Lumpy Gravy
8. Freak Out!
9. Absolutely Free

If you like the more abstract parts of the first 2, bump Lumpy Gravy higher.

2nd album has a terrific first side but also has the yucky "Brown Shoes Don't Make It,"

LOL, I can't stand the first side and think "Brown Shoes" is one of the best things he ever did.

I think "Brown Shoes" is a great sound collage, and the pedophilia is allegedly the dream of some City Hall worker, not Frank himself, but knowing where Roy Estrada ended up makes this one tough to listen to for me.

Non-Wacky Zappa POX, S&D, etc

xp -- ditto

the first couple of records tend to get more liked because one gets the sense from them that zappa hadn't entirely given up on humanity at that point

Well, or just people liking the sound of the band at that point and the songwriting.

I'm well into sixties rock and roll and happen to think that Freak Out is a document of one of the most dynamic and brilliant sounding bands around.

must admit that i never got that impression from "go cry on somebody else's shoulder" but to each their own

That's clearly one of the songs most reliant on '50s tropes (while a lot of the album is not), but still a nice tune with really good vocals.

Not to hijack this thread. But just read the lyrics to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" ... supposedly it was about a fashion faux pas of LBJ's and the "dirty old men who run our country." But even still, these lyrics stuck out:

A world of secret hungers
Perverting the men who make your laws
Every desire is hidden away
In drawer, in a desk
By a Naughahyde chair
On a rug where they walk and drool
Past the girls in the office

You see in the back of the City Hall mind
The dream of a girl about thirteen
Off with her clothes and into a bed
Where she tickles his fancy all night long

His wife's attending an orchid show
She squealed for a week to get him to go
But back in the bed his, teenage queen
Is rocking and rolling and acting obscene

Baby! Baby!
Baby! Baby!

And he loves it, he loves it, it curls up his toes
She bites his fat neck and it lights up his nose
But he cannot be fooled, old City Hall Fred
She's nasty, she's nasty, she digs it in bed

Do it again and do it some more
That does it, by golly, it's nasty for sure
Nasty-nasty-nasty, nasty-nasty-nasty
Only thirteen and she knows how to nasty

She's a dirty young mind
Corrupted, corroded
Well she's thirteen today
And I hear she gets loaded

If she were my daughter I'd...
(What would you do, Daddy?)
If she were my daughter I'd...
(What would you do, Daddy?)
If she were my daughter I'd...
(What would you do, Daddy?)

Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup
And strap her on again, oh baby
Smother that girl in chocolate syrup
And strap her on again

She's a Teenage Baby and she turns me on
I'd like to make her do a nasty on the White House lawn
Going to smother that daughter in chocolate syrup
And boogie till the cows come home

I also found this on the Absolutely Free site:

I recently began a pen-pal thing with a woman who went to school a couple of years behind Frank, Don, Motorhead and others. Hers is a pretty interesting perspective I thought I would share. As she has not given permission for me to give out her address, I've snipped the headers. (her text follows)

It was rumored that the song "She's only 13 and she knows how to nasty" was written about a girl a year younger than me called Patty Keenen who was a dead ringer for Bridget Bardot and looked old enough to buy beer for the boys..Alas poor Patty is no longer with us. And the song "Brown shoes dont make it" was the was it was in our school..brown shoes just weren't cool.

http://www.arf.ru/Notes/Afree/bshoes.html

In the wake of what we now know about the 60s free love scene in rock (hello Kim Fowley), lyrics like these make me super uncomfortable. They don't feel like satire -- or just satire anyway. They're just a bit too enthusiastic and detailed.

Maybe it's just looking at things like this without the benefit of contemporaneous eyes. Zappa really did have a distinctive voice musically that I still enjoy from time to time. But between his reported *love* of groupies, pretty much everything he wrote about women and the aggressive tone to his lyrics in general, I have a hard time with pretty much any of his vocal stuff, much less songs that veer into social commentary.

Hot Rats is honestly so so good, I looked this thread up to say. esp. Green Genes > Little Umbrellas, what a lovely stretch of music, so distinct, off in its own world

(I think the general nastiness of Zappa's outlook on the world as understood through his lyrics is something we've covered on this thread, and I concur that there's some deeply ugly shit in there)

Deeply love Hot Rats

I tend to cut off around '74 when he was still doing the Gamelan sounding stuff and hadn't gone totally into the really creepy scatological stuff . Also don't pay much attention to the '71 stuff.

BUt Mothers were pretty great in the 60s and the instrumental stuff around Gran Wazoo/Waka Jawaka is pretty good too.

the Boy Wonder sessions w Burt Ward are awesome. i love "Teenage Bill of Rights".

i love "jazz fart."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03F4nmPow9M

Freak Out! up to Uncle Meat = Classic.
Hot Rats = Classic.
Burnt Weeny Sandwich up to Just Another Band from L.A. = Some fans like this period, but it's not for me.
Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo = Excellent for fans of Frank the "composer"
Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe (') = Classic musically, but the rot starts to set in lyrically during this period IMO.

From 1975 to 1981, I enjoy the occasional track but find the albums quite patchy (particularly the albums that resulted from Lather being split up into various releases) and find the lyrics hit new levels of puerile in places, particularly on Sheik Yerbouti and Joe's Garage, then around 1983 I fall off entirely.

Just heard some instrumental Synclavier track and it sucked. Night School? something like that.

Yeah, from Jazz from Hell. for the longest time famous mostly for being the only instrumental album with a Parental Advisory sticker on it.

I don't like much of the synclavier stuff -- I don't know whether FZ had a limited timbral palette available to him or chose those crappy sounds, but often there were interesting compositions buried in there. Here is a terrific version of "Night School" played by humans (Ensemble Ambrosius) --

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

while i'm kind of glad he died when he did because he was enough of a misanthropic asshole at 52, i do wonder if his compositions might not have started sounding better if he had the chance to abandon the synclavier. or if he just would've started doing crappy midi. who knows.

i was listening to this tune that circulates as a frank zappa synclavier outtake called lakshi's delight. it doesn't sound anything like zappa, but it really highlights for me zappa's deficiencies as a composer. whoever wrote this piece has a better grasp of compositional technique than zappa, who was proud of only having one semester of formal training, did. listen e.g. to the baroque ending flourish, which isn't something zappa could ever have done. whoever composed this piece is also better able to integrate non-western musical technique than zappa ever could. worth comparing to a piece like "navanax", which is just a 100 second flurry of dissonant notes in improbable time signatures. i'm sure it's compositionally very sophisticated, but is it good?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66PxJWforEM

Jazz From Hell isn't great, but I think there's lots of solid tracks on Civilization Phase III

Pretty much agree with Turrican. However, I would add weasels ripped my flesh as well

also missing from his list: One Size Fits All and Roxy and Elsewhere, both classic IMO

Ooh good ones Moodles. Yeah cosign

"andy" is such a great song. he could do some great todd rundgren-style prog when the fancy struck him.

ts: "andy" vs. "zen archer"

also missing from his list: One Size Fits All and Roxy and Elsewhere, both classic IMO

― Moodles, Sunday, September 17, 2017 1:05 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ah yeah, One Size Fits All is great. His last truly great one, IMO.

Dunno, after Hot Rats it just ain't for me. Shame because half of what comes before is pretty classic

That "Lakshi's Delight" is really nice.

For me Sheik Yerbouti is where things went so irredeemably wrong that I basically gave up on any future releases.

that was the first Zappa I ever bought. it's pretty amazing to hear so much about what a genius Zappa is and how he's unparalleled as a composer etc. etc. and then actually buy one of his albums and have it contain a song like "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes". made me laugh at least. not sure how much of the album I could stomach now. though I'm pretty sure "Flakes" is still a great tune.

Also City of Tiny Lites and several others, it's pretty well split between great and terrible tracks.

Dylan impression on Flakes worth price of admission alone

biggest problem with sheik yerbouti is that he cut as much adrian belew from the songs as he could when belew left to tour with bowie. belew was the star of that band, and there's _lots_ of badass playing from him that was left on the cutting room floor because of personal animosity.

In the interest of fairness, I just relistened to "Flakes" and "Tiny Lights" for the first time in many years. I think you guys want something different from a Zappa record than I do.

"Yo Mamma" is the only song I remember liking; hot guitar solo, but even that one has really cheesy synths.

none of it sounds like 60s MOI, if that's what you mean

I love both the idea and execution behind "Rubber Shirt," I love the bit of Sinister Footwear that wound up in "Wild Love," I like the guitar jams and "City of Tiny Lites" and the Dylan impersonation a lot, and most of the album is forgettable or outright gross. SY was my 1st FZ album (bought in '79 when it came out) followed a few weeks later by Uncle Meat -- it was interesting connecting the dots between the two.

I guess I'm alone in hating the Mothers albums.

lol I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who hate any given Zappa album

I dig jazz from hell, it sure ain't for everyone

eat that question doc is worth a look

zappa was my number 1 since adolescence. I've been obsessed most of my life, but the recent barrage of docs/interview footage combined with some amount of getting older and the evolution of our collective societal notions has really soured me on him as a man and consequently put me off of a lot of his music. the guy had absolutely no respect for women to the point where he was downright abusive. his political satire does actually get fucking racist at times. id much rather listen to later beefheart record now a days. that dude humbled out. zappa didnt.

i kind of moved on myself. i became less impressed with him as a composer once i actually started listening to other modern composers. and goddamn there is no excuse whatsoever for "the illinois enema bandit". what a vile hunk of misogynist trash. he's got some good stuff, but his awful stuff is _really_ bad.

kurt OTM

Zappa was absolutely against censorship and being censored by the state but he was always off the money post We're Only in it for Money because that was the last time he was in touch with anyone

zappa was out of touch, Carlos had the market on progressive synth music covered in the 80s and he was doing some corny ass shit

biggest problem with sheik yerbouti is that he cut as much adrian belew from the songs as he could when belew left to tour with bowie. belew was the star of that band, and there's _lots_ of badass playing from him that was left on the cutting room floor because of personal animosity.

The posthumous release "Hammersmith Odeon" has 3 cd´s from that tour. Unfortunately without a version of "Wild Love". I liked the Capitol version of "Lumpy Gravy" (without the vocal parts and heavy razorblade editing) better than the official release. The Capitol version is on disc 1 of "Lumpy Money".

So I read Belew did the liner notes of a yet-to-be-released box of Zappa tour recordings, I think from '77.

Writing for orchestras, somehow I tend to see Zappa as a more melodic version of Boulez. "Yellow Shark" is a late masterpiece. I like it better than his Synclavier-music.