Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

i thought i would love the guitar solo edits records but alas they were really tough going. maybe i was tired of zappa by then (iirc i didn’t even get through sheik yerbouti). feel like there’s a single disc reduction that’s perfect that would take way too much effort to assemble

läther is absolutely dope tho. every side of zappa in its most realized permutation

My favourite Zappa guitar solo excursion is "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution (400 Days of the Year)" on Uncle Meat, most of the rest of his solos I can take or leave.

that one is great!!! the worst side effect of my zappa phase was figuring out how to enjoy uncle meat

Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar is also great for people who just wanna listen to bad ass guitar fusion madness without lyrics

I once bought it for exactly that reason, but sadly could not get into it :(

that one is great!!! the worst side effect of my zappa phase was figuring out how to enjoy uncle meat

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Thursday, December 30, 2021 2:02 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Uncle Meat is Houses of The Holy compared to Thing Fish, which is one of the worst records I have ever heard

I find it curious that my guitar teacher, who can play anything (more or less), *hates* Zappa's guitar playing. Like, I don't love it, but I've never had a problem with it. I think he saw an old Zappa interview where he was ripping on Motown for being shitty hacks or something and never forgave him for it.

Knew of the quote it the rest of this Lou Reed interview/set of takes is really funny.

Lou Reed, rock critic. pic.twitter.com/kzT8gnYk7A

— Theo Cogs (@realtedcogs) January 23, 2022

My favourite Zappa guitar solo excursion is "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution (400 Days of the Year)" on Uncle Meat, most of the rest of his solos I can take or leave.

― Halfway there but for you, Thursday, 30 December 2021 bookmarkflaglink

This is fantastic!

Lol yeah I was just looking at that Lou Reed bit. The Roxy Music one is spot on imo. Do Warhol next.

Shit, this is getting to what, half an album's worth of good Zappa music? Crazy..

Lou such a liar though, he was slagging off the Beatles a few years later.

Lol yeah I was just looking at that Lou Reed bit. The Roxy Music one is spot on imo. Do Warhol next.

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Monday, January 24, 2022 7:36 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

click the link to expand the pic and he does below doug yule though i suspect you will be disappointed

His comments on Alice Cooper are funny considering that they shared a producer and guitarists!

xpost

Haha no about what I expected tbh but one can always hope. Jeez I am absolutely failing at reading comprehension right now tho, that’s two for two. Back to lurking.

no worries! it didn't show on the pic

- In Pete Townshend's defence, he does say in "The Seeker" that Timothy Leary couldn't help him, it's the opposite of acid sermonizing.
- Lou obviously went back and forth on Dylan; when Bob said that he wished he had written "Doing the Things That We Want To", Lou sent a flunky to buy all of his recent records.
- Sterling Morrison was also a CCR fan, as well as the Band, I think?

Dylan was a big influence on early Lou, no? Some of these demos before John worked his magic, I mean...

Like you can trust anything Lou said in the 70s.

Indeed. Didn't we talk about how Lou almost got invited to play on the Rolling Thunder Revue? Also:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TURsO0Ho6fc/Um5GcsufA8I/AAAAAAAAFF8/dsca_1iMoog/s1600/1985_25_yr_award_with_Lou_Reed_Judy_Collins_2+-+copia.jpg

this has always sounded very VU to me:

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

I forgot about the whole Al Aronowitz Robbie Robertson Dylan Velvets connection.

Oh, wait this a Zappa thread so we should be talking about FZ making fun of Nico instead.

People's enthusiasm for Reed slagging off Zappa made me think about why that guy conjures up such animosity - my dad was a big Zappa fan but outside of that the only real Zappa lovers I've known are ppl otherwise not much into music. He's been unfashionable ever since I can remember, doesn't even get that much play in Mojo/Uncut type publications and yet ppl HATE Zappa with the sort of passion usually reserved for more ubiquitous artists. I know that he has his hardcore fans but they seem a pretty marginalised bunch within wider music discourse?

My grad program had a Zappa ensemble.

"Frank Zappa: Master Composer" was sometimes offered as a upper year undergrad elective.

Admittedly mostly because of one guy but it's not like he had trouble getting joiners.

To Sund4r's point, there are plenty of musos that like him.

"People's enthusiasm for Reed slagging off Zappa made me think about why that guy conjures up such animosity"

He is very near my interests. I like a lot of 'challenging' classical music, Beefheart etc. and the doc shows that people who make good music like him.

Having said that I am now enjoying Shut up and Play yer Guitar. I couldn't sleep and it was 2am but I am playing some now and its kinda ok to work to. He is not going to get anywhere near my favourite on the instrument but if I think of him as just shredding away and making a soup
of it. I like soup, it's nourishing.

Plus the title is now making sense -- like he is turning the hate on himself. He is definitely doing something a lot of the haters want him to do.

I think I cut off about 1975.
Do love that gamelan influenced thing he was doing a couple of years earlier, think it's gamelan anyway. Some semi ethnic influenced jazz rock thing.
BUt the puerile smut thing is a GTO. The endless look at me look at me.
Do love the Mothers too.
But that might be a cliche.
Anyway 66-75 possibly skipping 71 when he's doing smut too.
So similar to the era of the Grateful Dead I focus on roughly.

an attempt at exploring why FZ so enrages:

i think it's bcz he strongly shares one of the techniques embedded in rock's sense of its best self while remaining powerfully (and in fact annoyingly) sceptical of the shared and idealised utopia it is taken to represent and embody. his shallow refusal to be be persuaded is trollish in form!

the technique is basically "universal collage", meaning the splicing together of sounds and techniques and soundworlds from the recordec tradition into single quilt-form compositions, and also splicing together their associated but clashing ethoses (or whatever the plural of ethos is).

this is a basic technique in prog and it's called prog bcz it's considered progressive, a term with evident evolutionary valence not simply musical, but also political and moralistic, which is -- or was for a season -- assumed to be present in rock's happy experimental combinations of traditions: our experiments will bring a conflicted world together! jaz and classical and raga! ect ect

for zappa the technique is instead an unbendingly snide irritant expressing an amused refusal to believe that things are becoming better via combination: things are NOT becoming better and yr all twerps for thinking otherwise

i think he also throws the combinatorial net wider in a way that unsettles ppl -- or if not wider exactly (there's little to no world music dimension for example and his rhythmic palette is IMO quite a lot sparer than he thinks it is, he has no ear for latin polyrhythm despite where he grew up) then more aggressively and unrepentently inclusive of material that won't easily dissolve into the greater good (puerile smut! but not just this… )

as for his guitar, well, as is often the case in classic prog, it does *somewhat* function as the solvent and the glue, electric blues as the perspective of the self-taught everyman… and it's definitely less irritantly insoluble e.g. than the smut

tho i actually think it's often the least interesting element -- even in compositions that are dynamic and sprightly in their juxtaposition and their stiffnecked precision of rhythmic rigour the arrival of his solos is gnerally kind of a modal mulch-lsump where nothing much happens, especially harmonically, that's relevant to the composition (it's kind of a tell that he can make a project of cutting out his solos and stringing them together as a sequence of CD releases)

Yeah him being bigger with musos than critics/music geeks makes sense to me, most Zappa standom must be all but invisible to me.

Likewise I can imagine him being more present in the niches xyzz mentions yeah.

mark s I dunno to what extent this is intentional on your part but that description makes him pretty sympathetic for me!

i like everything abt his project except the noise it ends up making!

Frank Zappa: Great On Paper.

it's some time since i last read ben w4ts0n's book but i think i'm probably semi-channeling BW's line here -- or some of it anyway, i expect he likes the guitar more than i do

A lot of prog guys loved Zappa, though, incl Yes, probably the most 'utopian' of them.

our experiments will bring a conflicted world together!

Not entirely sure I get this from King Crimson or Van der Graaf Generator, though I could be convinced. There's a lot of cynicism and darkness there. And I actually do get a gleeful dissolving-boundaries/high-and-low-coming-together/power-of-music from Zappa. Main distinction seems to just be the lack of earnestness and commitment to wacky Spike Jones-esque absurdity.

I just think he frustrates people, even those of us who like some of his work, because there are a lot of fascinating, singular ideas that keep getting bogged down in stupid jokes that are hard to enjoy as an adult.

Tend to agree about his lead guitar playing btw, though there are some great moments.

I think what's frustrating is that the stupid stuff is also easy and lazy and not clever/funny at all, which, again, sets up the cynical Zappa paradox. "Oh, you think this was smart/funny? Well it was just me fucking around, you're an idiot for falling for it" vs. "oh, you think this wasn't smart/funny? Well, you're clearly not smart enough to get it, you fucking square."

Unfortunately, imo a lot of the instrumental stuff is kind of dumb, too. Too much ... musical acting?

In the spirit of "taking one for the team" I relistened to Zappa in New York yesterday. I've owned the original album since it was new in 1977 and almost never played it, but there is a 1991 CD version I was previously unaware of.

It restores the previously censored "Punky's Whips," which I had never heard, and which is homophobic and awful. He also reworks a couple Uncle Meat oldies, "Cruising for Burgers" and "Pound For a Brown" which are actually pretty good jazz/rock, but then they are surrounded by sexist and scatalogical bullshit like "Titties and Beer" and "Illinois Enema Bandit."

"A lot of fascinating, singular ideas that keep getting bogged down in stupid jokes" should really be the epitaph on his tombstone.

A large part of his project seems to be that the stupid jokes are on the same level as the music, that's why it's all mixed in together even if almost nobody other than him sees it that way.
I compared him to Godard above, and one aspect of that is keeping the audience conscious that everything on the records is only sound. So if you're offended by the characters "plooking" each other in "Keep It Greasey", he can turn around and say, "that isn't actually plooking, it's just a bunch of slap-basses overdubbed". This stance probably derives in some way from his early arrest for making a "pornographic audio recording" upon request from an undercover cop.

the problem with his humor isn't just that it sucks and isn't funny, it's that it's so actively mean; whenever I listen to You Are What You Is (one of his best late career albums!) when I get to Jumbo Go Away I just wind up hating the dude and won't ever want to listen to anything by him ever again

But he only put the stupid jokes in to sell records to morons and so finance his stunningly dull serious music endeavours. Is an argument I've heard.

Have I been hearing the marimba enlaced material as gamelan based or adjacent for years when it's based in something else. That element in like 72-74 that is something other than just rock or jazz based rock.
Anyway do like taht stuff.
But yeah can give up on him a couple of years later since its all way back in the past anyway. So do have the vantage point of being able to say taht stuff i like he veers way too far over in this direction by this point so I can silo his ouevre. Lucky me, don't need to be digging for treasure in his muso orientated eras. Got a load of other material by other bands to pick up on.
Area do a great thing with a lot of influence from his work as do various other proggy bands around the world. & did his combination of sources contribute massively to what became prog or at least show what could be done so that people did go out and find their own way to self expression which is pretty positive even if it didn't come directly from him that they did so. like.

But he only put the stupid jokes in to sell records to morons and so finance his stunningly dull serious music endeavours. Is an argument I've heard.

That's the argument Zappa himself makes in his autobiography! "For entertainment value only" is the term he used IIRC.

With the interminable xylophone noodling and bad sex jokes obscuring the occasional extremely tasty guitar solo or interesting tune, his 70s discography is absurdly offputting for people with knowledge of what proper hipster Miles/Can/King Crimson weirdo jazz-prog-rock should sound like. If instead you start with Freak Out / Absolutely / Only In It For the Money and center your appreciation of him as "decent disaffected songwriter taking the piss out of psychedelia", I think the 70s stuff makes a little bit more sense. Most of it does sound bad to me still, but I kind of perceive it in a context of a dude who's still sort of searching for strange sounds, while filtering his world view through parody and sexual exposure (naked disgusting humanity isn't it funny). That is, the smut is ideological not just a way to pay the bills. I think it's hard for me to appreciate how shocking Dyna Moe Hum or some other stupid sex song was in the 70s.

I think a decent compiler could easily make a much improved introduction to Zappa where disc 1 is a tour through his 60s weirdness with snippets of legitimate and parodic psych, doo wop and fine instrumentals; and disc 2 is the more digestible 70s stuff like Camarillo Brillo, Inca Roads, Black Napkins, Watermelon in Easter Hay, casting him as a sort of 70s guitar weirdo rather than an unfunny, unfunky George Clinton.

This stance probably derives in some way from his early arrest for making a "pornographic audio recording" upon request from an undercover cop

I WAS NOT AWARE OF THIS O_O

wiki:

An article in the local press describing Zappa as "the Movie King of Cucamonga" prompted the local police to suspect that he was making pornographic films.[9]: 85  In March 1965, Zappa was approached by a vice squad undercover officer, and accepted an offer of $100 (equivalent to $821 in 2020) to produce a suggestive audio tape for an alleged stag party. Zappa and a female friend recorded a faked erotic episode. When Zappa was about to hand over the tape, he was arrested, and the police stripped the studio of all recorded material.[9]: 85  The press was tipped off beforehand, and next day's The Daily Report wrote that "Vice Squad investigators stilled the tape recorders of a free-swinging, a-go-go film and recording studio here Friday and arrested a self-styled movie producer".[25] Zappa was charged with "conspiracy to commit pornography".[1]: 57  This felony charge was reduced and he was sentenced to six months in jail on a misdemeanor, with all but ten days suspended.[9]: 86–87  His brief imprisonment left a permanent mark, and was central to the formation of his anti-authoritarian stance.[9]: xv  Zappa lost several recordings made at Studio Z in the process, as the police returned only 30 of 80 hours of tape seized.[9]: 87  Eventually, he could no longer afford to pay the rent on the studio and was evicted.[24]: 40  Zappa managed to recover some of his possessions before the studio was torn down in 1966.[9]: 90–91

he actually spent time in jail for that!??!! no wonder he was such a grouch.

i keep getting recommended the documentary on hulu and every single time i consider it for a good ten seconds before moving along. i think i'll probably hate-watch it one of these days.

yeah if I spent time in gail for that I'd probably become a galaxy brain weirdo too

lol Freudian slip there ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03480/78674585_B58EAW_Fr_3480132b.jpg

(xp) LOL, awesome

I think my preferred Zappa era is very specifically Hot Rats, I have gotten a ton of mileage out of that Sessions box.