Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkEzUOBj434

Wasn't he signed on Eddie Van Halen's recommendation?

I listened to that "City Nights" clip and within the first 15 seconds I was thinking, yep, this is exactly the kind of thing I hate. Not just the squiggly eruption, but the two note riff that starts the thing — so many fusion jagoffs (and Zappa!) use exactly that kind of two note riff to start shit off and it just immediately punctures any joy I might potentially feel. And btw "joyless" is exactly how I'd describe Holdsworth's playing, if I had to choose just one word.

wow damn I get feverish ecstasy when he’s at his best

I got a negative impression of him from Bruford's autobiography, where he stormed out of the studio after being asked to overdub some rhythm guitar on Feels Good to Me. Apparently this conflicted with his self-image as a LEAD, not rhythm player.

fwiw I saw Holdsworth play in a small venue in the late '80s on a bill with Ronnie Montrose. Maybe I had young untrained ears, but I could not relate to what Holdsworth was doing at all, whereas Ronnie Montrose was amazing, perhaps the best guitarist I've ever seen. If memory serves, Holdsworth was mainly doing a layered chordal kind of thing rather than lead at that time.

I still find it kinda crazy that Steve Morse has been Deep Purple's guitarist for 26 years now.

Some of these chops monster mutants, there's just no right place for them. I think it's the lucky ones that can adapt to gigs like that or session work. The real weirdos, like Bozzio or Vai, are ultimately stuck being their own strange selves and making the most of it.

I was thinking that one reason why fusion got so sucky in the '80s is that everything was just too much: the playing, the fashion, the tones, the studio choices made, the synths (digital synths, plus synth drums, plus synth axe). Everything sounded too bright and slick and gross. Even the best stuff in the '80s, like John Scofield (another Miles vet!), sounded pretty bad, despite the awesome playing. Hence the shift to "fuzak," when the playing got so good the only challenge left was to make it utterly invisible.

this kind of bafflement (wtf are the fans getting out of this, how can i coax them into pining it down in a non-handwavy way?) is precisely what also sends me back to zappa and fripp tbrr: "i don't get it" = "so there's things i can learn from it (which may never include love)"

cross-genre dismissiveness is of course a perfectly normal punter response -- all of us have reaches of music that rankle -- but it's never a satisfactory critical response

(caveat: no one can be a satisfactory critic of everything, i'm not even sure what this could mean)

w/holdsworth what i probably mainly like is memories of time spent trying as an unrepentent early-gong fan to make sense of gazeuse in the late 70s -- if the (stupid term klaxon) post-punk impulse at that time wz opening yr mind to soundwork way outside yr usual ambit, well, this too was way outside my usual ambit so my task wz clear

I have an ex-friend who was a very well known guitar journalist, who interviewed Zappa (who said if my friend represented the future of music journalism —which he most assuredly did not— he would have to start respecting the profession) and almost every living elite guitar player from 1988 onwards, and who furthermore became friends, like peer-level friends, to like 75% of the elite guitar fraternity… he produced and recorded music with like five of these guys over the past 25 years. It is a dream come true for him, as it would be for tens of thousands of people, to be intimate friends with your heroes.

Yet he doesn't get along very well with anyone who isn't an elite chops musician, and doesn't particularly care about anyone as such. I bring him up because he is livid, like Trump supporter angry, that chops music was dethroned in the 90s. He is viscerally bitter at the injustice that not only is the music that his friends/heroes have done in the past 40 years is sneered at and that their new music is dismissed out of hand and is only prized by chops dead-enders, but that seemingly these men do not have special rights and privileges, that their achievements should afford them deference above other humans.

Did he not gravitate to prog metal? I thought that's where all the chops chaps ended up.

Andy McKee has videos with 59M views on Youtube.

that was my first thought also… but that wing of metal just buzzes with a fvckton of other potential social markers -- inc.the fact that a lot of it is p comfortably self-mockingly funny (which is not a kind of "funny" the various manifestations of music on this thread much intersect with?)

(i mean i can totally see why some ppl still as grown-ups find zappa funny but it rarely speaks to their self-deprecating self-awareness: there's not much omnidirectional levelling involved)

(lol xpost, my first thought was not abt andy mckee's youtube views and never will be)

for instance, he said to me once when we were at a strip club in NYC, which of course was playing hip-hop, pop, and metal that he didn't like, all of which I liked and obviously thought was suitable for hot girls to remove a flimsy garment and get marginally nasty to…

"why can't they dance to Holdsworth?" Swear to god he said that.

Holdsworth tolerated this guy but held him at arm's length relative to other men I mention above. When Holdsworth died somewhat insolvent and his family needed help with the aftermath, I'm sure that this guy, who is wealthy and with whom i have had no contact in many years, helped out quite a bit.

Ha, that's amazing. Did strippers dance to Allan Holdsworth in the 80s?

Thanks, I was after a new screen name!

the only music that real strippers will ever dance to

one time I was in a strip club during the day meeting my roommate and his workmates. it was deserted and the stripper was just sitting on the stage, drinking a Dr. Pepper through a straw and listening to "Silent Lucidity" by Queensryche

Can strippers dance in 13/8 time?

Those deserving of posterity certainly can.

those with deserving posteriors

They are the same ones iirc.

Hard to dance to guitar solos in odd time signatures.
Ha! xpost

There are so many chops monsters these days. In fact, I've often argued that the average kid (thanks to youtube and the like) is probably more proficient in their instrument than at any time before. I mean, you can find little kids shredding on line, or doing crazy drum stuff. There's not really a commercial outlet for that kind of stuff, but it is by definition kind of specialized. The last time there was a commercial place for it was probably back when dudes like Vai were playing bullshit in Whitesnake, or the guy from Ratt (a huge Zappa-head, iirc) was doing, well, Ratt. The exception being technical/prog/whatever metal, which, sure, can be culty and obscure, but not always; you still get bands like Tool filling arenas almost *exclusively* based on their chops. I think the key is finding something *interesting* to do with those chops rather than just showing off how fast you can play, because there are more than enough nerds already going that route and it's about as impressive in the end as a hot dog eating competition.

re: whether the guy would be into prog-metal; my guess is that he would be okay with it, but he's dismissive of stuff that has arisen from or is abetted by the internet, and believes that be-bop era to the time when super chops guitar began to get a bad name via Cobain to be the peak of human achievement…

“Anyone who can't dance to John Coltrane can't dance “ -Basquiat

My brain keeps giving me further iterations of reasons why I ultimately steer clear of this guy, but I feel like posting them on this thread would be uncharitable, like shooting fish in a bunghole.

One thing I could say is that I like to think that I like some things that are primitive as well as other things that are sophisticated, but tend not to like things that call attention to themselves in kind of an obnoxious way as in: see how smart I am, how hard I work, how talented, how much I practice, not like those other morons. On the flipside I do like things that are, um, smart about being super stupid like, say, The Monks, or... hey, look what I found https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/iggy-pop-on-early-van-morrison-and-frank-zappa-mothers-of-invention-567661

Now playing catchup and listening to Iggy associate the late Robert Sheff aka "Blue" Gene Tyranny .
https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/blue-gene-tyranny-1945-2020

Throughout his life Sheff approached music as a means to investigate perception and memory, and to expand our understanding of what human consciousness may involve. Making music, he confides in Bernabo’s film, is “a way of deeply informing myself that there’s another world”.

Just listened to one FZ tune I sort of like as penance before I continue.

Now listening to another one but, as is often the case I'd rather listen to the original (as I hear it) of what he is mocking. So "Son of Suzy Creamcheese" makes me want to listen to The Cowsills.

Is it Beefheart on "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" (which makes me want to listen to The Firesign Theatre) or Jimmy Carl Black?

I had never heard that before abt Bowie stealing Belew from in the wings

that seems a v Bowie move

Iggy's such a good storyteller

Yes. I didn't remember that particular detail. There is some other story about them all being in a restaurant and FZ freezing out AB iirc.

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/david-bowie-frank-zappa-adrian-belew/

http://forum.zappa.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=26957
Which links to https://www.facebook.com/AdrianBelew/posts/10150589290144995

Here's the original Adrian Belew post:
https://www.facebook.com/AdrianBelew/posts/10150588871654995

The radio in Detroit wasn't that great, but nowhere near as bad as it is now. You could hear the Beatles, Stones, Ronettes, Wailers, Booker T, early Motown, Jackie Wilson, the Kinks, and other good stuff on CKLW, the Detroit AM station, but you had to be patient and listen to lots of shit like Peter and Gordon, Freddie and the Dreamers, Leslie Gore, Frankie Avalon, etc. to hear what you liked.

I have a soft spot for the first two acts as well.

At his best, Zappa's work has a tension between respect for the "mystery of music" and cynicism about the potential manipulativeness. When Frank parodies something, the subtext is that HE is the one letting the listener hear the truth while the subject of the parody is in fact the cynical one. He's a little like Godard in trying to reveal the mechanisms behind the art to enlighten the audience.

a little

i mean i dont think this is an awful comparison but it isn't one that leaves frank looking good

Sure, Godard is one of the greatest filmmakers ever and Frank is in his weird niche.

swap out maoism swap in fart jokes, sorted 🎸 😃

Spotify's This is Frank Zappa playlist starts off with the execrable Bobby Brown Goes Down, which seems like a pretty terrible ice breaker for a curious listener in 2020

tbf not sure a playlist, whether created by a person or algorithm, is any kind of ice breaker for dude's music to begin with

Lol, Mark.

lol so i played thru all five FZ items on the spotify alg (all bad sorry frank) and the next item that came up was "little house i used to live in (piano intro)", as played by the meridian arts ensemble on an LP *so* tailored towards me that it's called ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE lol (=music by zappa debussy barber), which is a bit of a (what bloom wd call) CLINAMEN aka SWERVE to be sure, follwoed by something from THE YELLOW SHARK (1993)

i mean my alg is my fault obv and sux to be me but so far (like 12 songs in) apart from one song or section from tYS i've had *nothing* in my FZ selection but orchestras ploughing thru his works making them sound like try-hard nothing-special pastiche of (better) early 20th C "serious" music (with bits of film ST thrown in now and then)?

at least he's not singing i guess

sorry i don't know why i'm doing this, it's irritating for actual fans i know