Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

But how many people played with Zappa? 100? More? (Less?) It's just wild to me that even a modest percentage of these mutants didn't amount to much (imo) outside of his orbit.

Because the later bands in particular are just full of faceless conservatory trained musos perhaps? The opposite of Zappa himself in fact.

not sure why people who were in bands led by one of the most important jazz musicians of the 20th century went on to greater success than people who were in bands with...

i mean look other people here can put down zappa's stuff much better than i can, but it's kind of _niche_, you know? miles davis was a big fish in a medium-sized pond, and zappa was a pretty small fish in a stadium-sized pond.

rock also isn't a medium that puts a premium on instrumental virtuosity outside of, like... guitar solos to an extent. how many members of prog-rock bands (that aren't genesis) have had successful solo careers?

That's a good question/point! I guess one big difference is that a lot of those prog bands didn't break up, so there was no need for solo careers and whatnot, whereas Zappa (being a solo artist) couldn't break up, but he did churn through musicians at a prodigious clip.

Rick Wakeman the obvious exception, maybe Steve Hackett too. Although I suppose Bill Bruford considered himself successful leading a jazz group for a couple of decades, so success is relative.

Hackett was in Genesis, of course, but never achieved Phil or Mike levels of saturation.

Steve Vai, Lowell George and George Dude is probs the only ones that had real post-Zappa non sidemen careers

― kurt schwitterz, Monday, December 11, 2023 5:22 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Are we not including Ponty here? I guess technically he was doing just fine before Frank, right?

Don Preston and Ian Underwood have played with a bunch of people.

Chester Thompson, Vinnie Colaluta, & Chad Wackerman have had really big careers as drummers for hire.

Ponty and Peter Wolf both were able to take playing with Zappa into wider musical careers.

Zappa worked with quite a few studio musician ringers over his career too.

Lots of the other guys played on other bands especially the horn players.

Mike Keneally is in Dethklok!

if Lowell George could hang with the Zappa crew and go on to form a band as distinct from Zappa as Little Feat, then why couldn't anyone else shift gears like that

Zappa was inclined, as soon as he had the wherewithal, to hire the best technicians (players) he could; in other words, people whose musical skills could fit into a number of contexts but who weren't necessarily pursuing an individual musical "vision". When Lowell George played him his original songs, he told him to get his own group; it's hard to imagine a Little Feat song, bar a couple of early novelty oddities, played by the Mothers. So he was an exception.
Also, as people have suggested, the kind of technical mastery that Zappa demanded had limited commercial potential in rock as a whole, so there really wasn't room for all of these instrumentalists with their abstruse abilities to form groups of their own, even if they had wanted to.

A Ruth Underwood solo career would have had no commercial potential, but I would been interested.

I dunno, if Narada Michael Walden could go from playing drums in Mahavishnu to writing and producing pop hits for Aretha and Whitney, then anything is possible.

I don't know how many times different people are going to have to explain what is pretty obvious here

otm

Heh. I was thinking more of the application of virtuoso skills in a medium that does not showcase virtuosos.

I guess in the end working for Zappa was probably pretty self-selecting. Does Trader Joe's only employ friendly people, or do only friendly people apply for jobs at Trader Joe's?

I guess in the end working for Zappa was probably pretty self-selecting. Does Trader Joe's only employ friendly people, or do only friendly people apply for jobs at Trader Joe's?

― Josh in Chicago

see, i don't see it that way, if you're working at a job that encourages and supports you in being friendly, you're going to become more friendly!

True, in the abstract, but like also attracts like. Training or no, I doubt there's anyone working at Sephora that isn't into beauty products.

reminds me of when I applied to Burger King at 16 and there was a section on the application that said "Why do you want to work at Burger King?" I had no idea what to write so I just put "I like Whopper"

(it was just a formality anyway, I had a friend who knew the manager so it was one of those "as long as you're here on time" sorta deals)

If I liked Whopper, Burger King would definitely have been the right place for me.

if you're working at a job that encourages and supports you in being friendly, you're going to become more friendly!

This is why Adrian Belew smiles and laughs so much after working with Zappa and Fripp

True, in the abstract, but like also attracts like. Training or no, I doubt there's anyone working at Sephora that isn't into beauty products.

― Josh in Chicago

i'm not sure liking beauty products is a personality trait!

(it was just a formality anyway, I had a friend who knew the manager so it was one of those "as long as you're here on time" sorta deals)

― frogbs

god dammit you lucked out, i had to pass this job interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR5F762gq2Y

i didn't object to the interview process itself, i'm just not into cho aniki bod. well, i've learned. when my department gets outsourced i'm going to apply at femboy burger king.

This is why Adrian Belew smiles and laughs so much after working with Zappa and Fripp

― Halfway there but for you

well, you know what they say, like attracts like :)

Help I'm a Rock the vocalizations get grating but damn Can must have loved this song

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, December 11, 2023 1:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think Faust were the folks who were really inspired by that early Mothers stuff, their fingerprints are all over those 70s albums

Indeed. I definitely read an interview (probably with Holger Czukay) where the (early) Mothers were mentioned as one of the inspirations for Can. I doubt they had much interest in his later work.

Often you'd find the Mothers and the Velvets being grouped together as being inspirational acts - ironically enough.

if you listen to the tape of the velvets from the '69 hilltop festival, the taper is talking about frank zappa towards the beginning. not sure what he's saying about zappa, tho.

As I'm sure at least I have brought up before, the idea of Zappa, just like the idea of the Dead or the Band, to an extent, transcended the music. I think back to David Bowie's Pin-Ups, when he covered a couple of early Springsteen songs. I think that was something similar, at least in his case. He liked the idea of Springsteen, even if he almost immediately realized he probably had nothing in common with the guy.

The VU, imo, had a lot more of a direct influence on acts, at least to my ears.

I was thinking in terms of influence on underground music in Europe, that's where the Mothers and the Velvets were often grouped together. The most obvious example is the Plastic People of the Universe but Faust is another fairly obvious one.

the mothers performed at the essener song-tage festival in 1968, a major international festival ended up being definitional for krautrock as the quasi-politicised local variant of underground rock: line-up incuded (alongside several topical global youth-culture names) amon düül, brötzmann, floh de cologne, guru guru, xhol caravan and tangerine dream (plus sevewral others not yet performing within their better-known group names

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationale_Essener_Songtage#Künstler

give or take my usual irritation that the uselessness of the word influence, almost all the top- and second-tier names in KR make obeisance of some sort to frank as inspiration, even if it's p hard to hear a similarity (i can't really hear one in faust tbrr): i think more as an "i ienver knew you could do that!"-type revelation at the festival, where the "that" would actually end up being their own thing and not very like zappa's at all

viz both czukay and irmin schmidt do this, even though can's modus operandi as improviser-composers was group-form in a way that zappa's never was, even with the mothers (tbf schmidt also told sasha frere jones a couple of years back that e.g. jaki leibezeit didn't share this taste (https://substack.sashafrerejones.com/p/irmin-schmidt) (happily confirming my prejudice that zappa's rhythm sense is the narrowest aspect of his skillbase lol)

zappa had also been waylaid and barracked by the political wing of the radical commune-movement after a show at the sportpalast -- including a mildly destructive stage-invasion -- which may or may not have been provoked by some disobliging things he had said about germans (they demanded he be more political). he was very pissed off (lol) but i slightly suspect this fracas was also inspirational to those KR groups that overlapped with the radical commune-movement, bcz they too were a bit fed up of being hectored about content by non-musicians? iirc amon düül split in two right after the essen song days fest, over these kinds of issues. so here the "influence" was more like finding permission to say no (not that can for example needed te permission exactly, but they were determined to pursue a sound which was formally and structurally radical, undistracted by -- as they saw it -- mere shallow verbal radicalism etc)

sportpalast = berlin sportpalast (also 1968)

Good stuff.

the typos are my hommage to european free jazz

ienver is a keeper

that's really interesting, thanks mark s

almost all the top- and second-tier names in KR make obeisance of some sort to frank as inspiration, even if it's p hard to hear a similarity (i can't really hear one in faust tbrr)

The first Faust album is practically Zappa cosplay at points! They even had a member who called himself "Zappi"!

hey now

No offence

yes my screen name comes from Faust's drummer, as I was listening to "I've Got My Car And My TV" while on the signup page.
that song is very Zappa in retrospect.

^^ yes that song in particular seems to have a big Zappa/Mothers influence. not just in the wacky carnival-like clavier bit but also the vocals, Zappa loved to make people sing weird and stilted melodies like that

I think their spirit of experimentation is also very similar, lotta cut-up stuff and plug-this-into-that sorta messing around

keep in mind this only applies to his stuff up to like, Uncle Meat. maybe Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels too but those I think were mostly recorded before Hot Rats. after that he got a lot more jazzy which Faust couldn't really keep up with. and of course the later hard rock Zappa stuff is a totally different beast

The guitar playing on that track is totally Zappa.

... plus the album ends with a kind of boozy nod to "America Drinks and Goes Home".

The debut's "Miss Fortune" has that wah-wah organ that seems to be playing the chords toZappa touchstone "Louie Louie"

It helps a bit in Zappa appreciation if English is not your native language.

Very probably except it was the early, less lyrically problematic, stuff that was most influential.

Right, fair enough.

"Bobby Brown" was huge in Europe somehow, #1 in Sweden and Norway Top 10 elsewhere.

Very probably except it was the early, less lyrically problematic, stuff that was most influential.

In "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," from the 2nd Mothers album, a character fantasizes about fucking his 13-year-old daughter.

that's true but Brown Shoes is pretty fascinating outside of that, or at least it must've been if you were hearing it in 1968. correct me if I'm wrong but had anyone done a long cut-up pop song like that before? what I have a hard time understanding is them getting into later Zappa, maybe not like the Sheik Yerbouti/Joe's Garage albums as a whole (which still have a lot of fascinating stuff on them), but Bobby Brown being big overseas, yeah that's pretty weird. makes me wonder if there are non-English speakers who are into like, the Bloodhound Gang

Scandinavian sense of humour at work? Somewhere along the lines of the German sense of humour perhaps.

The Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" and "Brown Shoes" were both recorded (roughly) contemporaneously, 2nd half of 1966. A Quick One beat Absolutely Free to release by about 5 months.

and it's even a good song to boot