Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

For all I know I first came to it via ILX, but iirc this Ian Penman Wire essay resonated with a lot of anti-Zappa people:

http://e-limbo.org/articulo.php/Art/1259

ums, wait til you get to "Stick It Out"

For all I know I first came to it via ILX, but iirc this Ian Penman Wire essay resonated with a lot of anti-Zappa people:

http://e-limbo.org/articulo.php/Art/1259

― Josh in Chicago

for everyone who is worshipped as a god, there will inevitably be a richard dawkins, someone whose mouth-frothing opposition actually makes the object of his ire seem likable by comparison.

ums, wait til you get to "Stick It Out"

― frogbs

seriously, "the illinois enema bandit". absolute nadir of his catalogue, probably worse than "thing-fish" (a three-record musical which can most generously be described as "staggeringly ill-conceived").

that's not to say that "joe's garage" isn't utterly terrible, but he's done _so much worse_.

that essay ain't completely without merit though. "Jack-off of all trades" is a pretty good line. this part pretty much sums up what I find so frustrating about the guy:

He had long hair but sneered at longhairs; he made a long and lucrative career out of endless guitar solos but sneered at other rock musicians; he constantly bumped his little tugboatful of 'compositions' up against the prows of the classical establishment, but he lambasted that, too. In stuff like "The Torture Never Stops" and "Dancing Fool" he got some of his biggest audiences by exploiting the very idea of exploitation he was supposedly upbraiding. He sneered at people who took drugs; he sneered at their parents who didn't. Most of all, he sneered at women; girls trying to get by in a world of hateful, mastery-obsessed fools like himself. He sneered at anything which represented the mess and fun and confusion of life. He sneered, in short, at anything/everything that wasn't Frank Zappa.

obviously worth mentioning that a lot of his early work really was groundbreaking and subversive. I don't like stuff like "Billy the Mountain" all that much but I appreciate that they're still having fun at that point. I think a lot of the obnoxiousness, hypocrisy, and even misogyny could have been more easily forgiven if his stuff was actually funny. There's just so little cleverness in his work after 1969.

Who was it that smugly said "if you don't like it that's okay because you weren't supposed to" in the Zappa classic albums episode?

if you were stuck on the proverbial desert island, which disc(s) would you rather have ‹ one solitary song by Brian Wilson or the entire Zappa back catalogue?

Man, talk about your punch-in-the-face vs. kick-in-the-nuts dilemmas...

I've talked a bit about Zappa with my guitar teacher, who can play anything and whose rotating artist cover band has done a Zappa night once or twice. He's dug in deep before as prep work but still doesn't really rate Zappa as a guitarist or a composer, and despite liking bits and pieces of his catalog hypothesizes that Zappa's persona stems from a frustration with not being instrumentally adept or inventive enough as whatever kind of artist (classical, jazz, rock, whatever) he envisions himself as. That's why he defaults silly or sarcastic or snide, as a defense mechanism - "jack-off of all trades" indeed. It's really easy to be a bomb thrower accusing other artists of mediocrity when you can hire virtuosos to disguise or camouflage your own vampy mediocrity. Similarly, it's really easy to pretend to be a virtuoso by writing crazy charts then hiring the best people to play them, but he's no Carl Stalling.

I've got to admit, my very limited Zappa listening originated back when I would play drums, and I'd pick up something like "Joe's Garage" specifically because Vinnie Colaiuta was on it. I'm not sure I ever listened to the stuff as 'songs,' as such, just a vectors for the playing. But very quickly I gravitated more toward straight fusion or jazz or other stuff with better playing, because it was in service of better compositions and wasn't hampered by some dude(s) ironically singing about VD or something.

its a grower man

No, he's right, it's horseshit.

Good post, JiC.

if coming up with a good zing was a rare or valuable gift, if that one zing wasn't buried in an ocean of overheated rhetoric, i might rate "jack-off of all trades" more.

that quoted paragraph... it's not wrong, but it also comes off as a paraphrasing of zappa's own "i'm not satisfied" from '66:

"I'm not satisfied
Everything I've tried
I don't like the way
Life has been abusing me"

well carve _that_ on his tombstone.

penman's piece also comes off as, well, an extended sneer. zappa had the temperament, though not the literacy, to make a pretty good rock critic.

as an aside, i think the whole "mediocre guitar player" thing is overstated. yeah, he did more than his share of mediocre vamping. yeah, compared to some of his "sidemen", like belew, he was a hack. but this "zappa as second-rate guitar player" narrative requires one to overlook that he played a lot of really good shit. "cookin' turnips", "400 days of the year", "willie the pimp" (god do you know how many _bad_ versions of "willie the pimp" there are? the "hot rats" version isn't one of them), "the ocean is the ultimate solution"... his big problem is that he never paid enough attention to tone, and as a result many of his solos blend together into one long weedly-weedly-wee. but he could play very well, usually when pushed out of his comfort zone (the issue being, really, that zappa went to great lengths to keep that sort of thing from happening). that impromptu acoustic duet he did with shuggie otis on the johnny otis show in 1970 - zappa holds his own extremely well there. or playing with pink floyd in 1969 - one wouldn't necessarily think that zappa would sound that good playing "interstellar overdrive", but he fits in pretty damn fantastically.

rushomancy otm. guy is not a fuckin' guitar god but he can play, his tone is ridiculous and he's doing it just going direct, and he generally doesn't overplay. he likes to overplay when the crowd's into it but as a guy coming at playing electric from a blues reference and trying to shoehorn that into aspirationally "difficult" music in a rock context, he's prety fuckin' good.

everybody else otm about how poorly all his shtick has aged. as a kid, I thought he was fucking hilarious, and I feel embarrassed to have been as open as I was to his smugness/condescension/general grossness. I do remember his SNL appearance ("dancin' fool" & something about the meek not inheriting the earth) as the point where I went - you know - I think I'm not into this shit now, was it always bad like this?

There's no doubt at all the guy is a more than competent musician. That's not my point. My point is that he's a snob and a musical elitist, but he himself is pretty generic, really highlighted by hiring folks like Belew or Via or whomever to show off in his place. Like, you can't make a big to-do about complexity and sophistication and virtuosity and then stink out ploddingly generic blues licks. It's like the bits of pieces I've heard from Phish. Like, I get it, dude, but you're no Jerry Garcia. (Ironically, Phish-dude is very Zappa-esque in his playing.)

ehhh, you kind of lose me when you posit jerry garcia as offering some alternative to "ploddingly generic licks".

anyway, steely dan are just as smug and elitist. they're just more _literate_ about it.

Sorry, was in rush. Not a Dead fan myself, but Garcia had personality.

Steely Dan was smart. Zappa was smart, too, but wasted much of that on being dumb.

Sorry, was in rush. Not a Dead fan myself, but Garcia had personality.

― Josh in Chicago

so does zappa! it just happens that his personality is repellent. :) zappa's guitar playing is pretty easily recognizable - like garcia, his playing has certain obvious limitations. either you accept the limitations and enjoy the music in spite of them, or you don't.

Steely Dan was smart. Zappa was smart, too, but wasted much of that on being dumb.

― Josh in Chicago

no offense meant, but is that statement supposed to mean something?

rushomancy you squander yr capital when you harsh on garcia, whose playing is wonderful

you know ppl make such a big deal about how snarky Steely Dan are but I find so much of their much so touching, so impossibly sad, I don't know how you could listen to Rose Darling or Dr. Wu or Rikki or any number of their songs and not feel the real heart behind the sardonic persona they put out in interviews. maybe they didn't want to deal with it themselves but I don't really put them in the same league as Zappa at all. they have songs that people love.

Yeah. SD made an effort to be musically and lyrically ambitious. They aspired to jazz sophistication in a rock context, with subversively weird words. But they had the chops and knowledge and literacy to pull it off. Zappa often took imo an easier, broader route, by playing it.dumb.

re: Dead, they did not posit themselves as sophisticated perfectionists. In fact, exactly the opposite! They were all about imperfections. If anything, Zappa as player showed him playing it safe. Modest noodling while the real pros stuck to the fly shit on paper charts.

xpost Sorry, improvising slowly on phone.

the Dan's cynicism is not rooted in contempt - they just have very dark senses of humor. but yeah as ums notes there's a profound sadness that runs through SD's stuff, a wistfulness, a sweetness. Zappa only gets wistful, at all, in the Ruben & the Jets music - and then makes sure the lyrics don't run along the same track

^ He's afraid to let his defenses down and reveal himself a fraud, imo. Or at least less than he makes himself out to be.

Contempt is the key word encapsulating Zappa.

apologies, i try not to say assholish shit like that. anyway the thing that makes zappa, or hicks, or any of the heroes of young white men who believe themselves to be oppressed, particularly tiresome in this day and age is his wholesale adoption of the paranoid style, the constant litany about how everybody is trying to screw him over. he has other bad qualities, but in the present moment this looks like his worst. it's not a quality the dan gave the impression of having much of. this, more than his supposed "contempt", is his most toxic quality- his barely disguised self-pity.

but i think most dan-loving, zappa-hating critics are all about the _literacy_. zappa didn't like books, didn't read books, and made no bones about it. saying zappa was lacking in "chops" or "knowledge", i just don't see that there's the evidence to back it up. there's lots he didn't know, but saying that his songwriting was amateurish compared to steely dan... no, i don't see the evidence for that.

i also don't think zappa was a "playing it safe" soloist. to me "playing it safe" is doing the gilmour thing of writing a solo and playing it every night. zappa's solos were genuinely improvised, and this is why he played so many generic blues licks, why it's so uneven, because of that risk-taking. he stacked the deck in his favor by hiring crack rhythm sections (having a great drummer makes one a better guitar player).

i agree that garcia's playing is wonderful... sometimes.

xp

^ He's afraid to let his defenses down and reveal himself a fraud, imo. Or at least less than he makes himself out to be.

I think the issue's more personal, I don't think Zappa's a "fraud" - I think he's kinda fucked up, for lack of a better way to put it. he's constructed a sort of rationalist shell around himself for whatever reason, and it requires constant shoring-up -- over the course of his life, the maintenance of the shell takes precedence over more & more. I sorta get where a guy interested in music as a process might spend a fair bit of time thinking "look...the role of the emotions in all this has been vastly overstated" but in Zappa's case this position seems to stem from a general unwillingness to concede that *feeling things* is a worthwhile pursuit. and it's fair to hang this on him from a survey of his work, too. he did have some good affirmative values, per his family: of taking care of them, of being present. those aren't small things. but my impression of him -- and I say this as a fan of his good stuff; I think there's a fair bit of it, personally -- is that of a guy who would have preferred to quash any tenderness inside of himself, or to relegate it to occasional 32-bar outbursts during instrumental passages played onstage.

great post Joan. Zappa will always be classic to me for the "flower power sucks" line in "Absolutely Free". "Mom & Dad" also was a nice empathetic track. But these are outliers in his career it seems...

xpost I don't think anyone's being assholey here, actually, especially considering the subject. Zappa love is a bit of an enigma to me, in part because he was so prolific that even many of his fans have huge hunks of his catalog they may despise. He's full of contradictions - beloved for things people hate in other acts, hated for things loved in other acts, that sort of thing. In the end, if his output was mostly instrumental I bet his music would have aged better, vampy or mediocre or not. It's the words that sink the S.S. Zappa.

Speaking of Steely Dan, I could totally imagine "The Fez" as a Zappa song and being sung in his smug speak-sing voice and hating it.

I don't know much about Zappa's upbringing. What were his parents like? Having just read that most recent Van Halen book and learning, at least in a cursory sense, about Mommy and Daddy Van Halen, I've got sins of the father on the mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9P2V0_p6vE

it's interesting how much of a conflict Zappa's love of the avant garde (Varese) was his initial impetus, but he approached it with seriousness and got laughs. Not sure how intentional the laughs were, but in some ways Zappa cheapened experimental music, he seems like someone who was very much in conflict with his desires.

sorry that was poorly worded

Do you mean that the way the host treated his ideas like a joke might have had some kind of formative impact, in that FZ might have become self-conscious or reserved about being earnest about experimental music?

Don't think necessarily that the host affected Frank's drive for experimental music going forward, just that Frank always had this unusual pull between serious music/jokes and I wonder where the contradictions began. Frank genuinely loved the avant-garde but I wonder what the audiences response made him feel - and whether it flared up his contempt of them. It's difficult to tell whether Frank expected audiences to get the experimental impulses, but I doubt he cared - he seemed to have a thing of being above others intellectually.

Kind of interesting to compare it to this Cage TV appearance from three years earlier. Obv Cage is more generous/instructive (and openly 'welcomes laughter') but I feel like this is also facilitated by a much more respectful attitude from the host, even though he also finds the ideas strange. I wonder how Cage would have handled the Steve Allen show.

great post Sund4r. I feel like Zappa set himself up to be misunderstood - it was a self fulfilling prophecy, it's hard to imagine a world in which he was uniformly accepted.

anyways that Cage youtube is great evidence that it took time for people to accept more ambiguous ways of expression (the laughter)

these videos are insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTdTvK_d9lQ

anyways that Cage youtube is great evidence that it took time for people to accept more ambiguous ways of expression (the laughter)

... and here's John Cale on the same show.

It is just a rock n' roll myth that Zappa spent some of his last years crying while listening to doowop records?

Him and Lou Reed used to get together and have all day blubbing sessions.

in some ways Zappa cheapened experimental music

lol sure

statements like this make me extra glad we had a Zappa

I don't know much about Zappa's upbringing. What were his parents like? Having just read that most recent Van Halen book and learning, at least in a cursory sense, about Mommy and Daddy Van Halen, I've got sins of the father on the mind.

― Josh in Chicago

there's one picture of him with his parents, taken by life magazine circa 1970. beyond that zappa didn't have much to say about his parents.

if we're going to play armchair psychoanalysis - a pretty strong temptation with zappa - i'd point to the incident in '64 or '65 where he was entrapped by some asshole cop and thrown in jail for ten days on "obscenity" charges, in the process losing his recording studio. i can't imagine something like that _not_ leaving a major mark on one's psyche, and it's hard for me not to view his subsequent strong advocacy of "offensive" speech in that light.

in some ways Zappa cheapened experimental music

― Week of Wonders (Ross)

hey now, experimental jazz was already free!

Ha, yeah, tbf, I don't even really know what it would mean to 'cheapen' experimental music.

(Also, a lot of people still have trouble accepting it!)

not to be that guy, but which things exactly are being called "experimental" here? cage's definition is something like: composition or creation deploying indeterminacy to reach endpoints that couldn't be predicted in detail from the outset -- and one-offs aside, i'm not sure anything zappa routinely does really falls into this category, he was always an intensely controlling* composer, albeit one at an unusual number of different levels (if that make sense)

(obviously fz's audience interraction games produced material that does -- all live performance has elements of unpredictability -- but as soon as he's in a studio quilting elements of it into concrète collages the "experimental" dimension is stripped straight back out)

*cage was also highly controlling in person but very much in service of the genuinely unpredicted

no idea what i was talking about there with that statement, my apologies.