Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

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

I think its funny that the Chunga's Revenge cover has become one of those iconic photos of Zappa, even though he never yells like that. Hell he barely even raises his voice. Can you imagine what Zappa screaming like that must sound like? probably like Weird Al or something

pretty sure he is yawning

mods can you please delete that post

his not mine

he's right, though, definitely yawning

He had a premonition of his next 20 years of guitar solos

Yawn Work For Duda

lol halfway

thinking of giving Uncle Meat a try soon on the recommendation of a friend

its a good first Zappa album if that's what you mean

people like to recommend We're Only In It For the Money & Hot Rats but the former vastly overstates how clever he is and how many short catchy tunes he writes and the latter is remarkably tight jazz fusion with no attempts at being funny at all which vastly overstates his ability to shut the fuck up

Uncle Meat kinda has it all though, it's the yin and yang of Zappa from one minute to the next

I can't remember, does he sing on "Uncle Meat"? That's one of the biggest problems with Zappa, his own vocals.

if yes: good first and last zappa album
if no: same

i think he sings some, those weird pitched up vocals he did back then, but also a lot of the vocals are ray collins

Interesting thing about Zappa and singing was like many he struggled to be able to sing and play guitar at the same time. He was never that good at it and usually would not play when he sang as I understood.

Uncle Meat was one I thought was annoying on Cd as there is all that other stuff he added. The original album sequence only came out in the last edition, which I have never heard. The King Kong segment is really good, that is one of his better pieces of music. There is a really good video of the original band playing that one on the tube.

He only sings a few lines here and there (and there aren't that many songs), but you do get to hear him have an argument with Jimmy Carl Black. The reissue features several minutes of him arguing with New York City cops investigating a noise complaint.

local charity shop had a bunch of Zappa stuff in, mostly 80s stuff that I have no interest in
I did buy this copy of infamous 70s Zappa/Beefheart bootleg Confidential tho. mainly cos someone had made their own sleeve for it, love it when people do that!

https://i.imgur.com/eA5Dk6t.jpeg

I love those too, but they're much better when someone tries to draw a picture of the artist on it :)

and yes re: Uncle Meat if you've got the version with the film dialogue on it you can safely skip all that. Zappa CD reissues can be extremely weird, they have bonus tracks but they're sometimes not from the same sessions or even the same decade. iirc there's also some Italian song about a penis that was recorded in like 1985 on it too

dunno if anyone will vouch for his 80s work here, I did pick up a copy of You Are What You Is though which I think was the one from that era which is pretty good. it's got some songs I absolutely hate though so maybe not. idk when I'm gonna listen to it actually.

The 80s album I like the most is Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch. Beyond that there are some decent tracks scattered across the rest, and I like all the live stuff that came out in the Ryko years.

Is that the one with ValleyGirl? Been tempted to check it out with the vague hope of hearing Zappa go new wave

i'm waiting for the opportunity to rec thing-fish to a zappa newb. just completely put them off zappa forever.

The Meat/Light CD is worth investigating, there's the original mix version and a great cd of unreleased material.

i'm waiting for the opportunity to rec thing-fish to a zappa newb. just completely put them off zappa forever.

I'm game.

hahahaha do it and report back

Thing-Fish was the last Zappa album I bought, and basically put me off forever. Still got a copy filed with the other box sets, cover G-, but I'm guessing the vinyl is NM.

It is terrible. Beyond all the blatantly offensive stuff, I really don't like how much of it is recycled songs from his catalog made much worse. Weirdly enough, I kind of like the live versions of some of the Thing-Fish tracks. They worked much better out of the context of the album and all of the awful "acting" on it.

xps You Are What You Is is as far as I've gone with Zappa and yeah it is good, just solid song after solid song (usual caveats for "comedy" and objectionable lyrics so ymmv).

Jumbo Go Away is one of the meanest songs he ever wrote, made even meaner by the fact that it’s got no actual humor in it

Ben Watson confronted him about that song in the interview in his book, and Zappa says it was just reportage of an actual incident, but it says something that he reported it in that way (I say only having read the lyrics).

I've just listened to the song and it's total garbage.

xps You Are What You Is is as far as I've gone with Zappa and yeah it is good, just solid song after solid song (usual caveats for "comedy" and objectionable lyrics so ymmv).

― visiting, Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

You are not selling it with that caveat.

me every single time:

I've just listened to the song and it's total garbage.

― The Prime of the Ancient Minister (Tom D.), Monday, 1 April 2024 10:51 (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh great, the shit on Zappa thread is open for business again. I think he’s a lot like The Grateful Dead, with hardcore zealots trading bootlegs, other folks who like certain aspects or certain eras, and those for whom the music is just never going to click whatsoever.

fwiw I find You Are What You Is unlistenable.

I actually I like some of his stuff but he's been responsible for some of the worst music ever recorded by anyone.

xpost i think people can find the Dead boring but Zappa has a level of nastiness and misogyny that's a different beast

I say this as the only person who likes Zappa and the Dead the exact correct amount, everyone else either likes them too much or too little

me too to be fair (see above, it also applies to the dead lol)

As someone who likes a bunch of Dead bootlegs from the late 60s early 70s I would say they are not the same deal.

I'm a sort of dabbler in different Zappa eras. For me, he peaked with Hot Rats and I like him way more when he sticks to the instrumental work, but I've grown to appreciate more of his catalog as I've gotten older. I used to hate him completely and I still kinda hate 60% of what I hear, but that other 40% is pretty damn good.

Grateful Dead is just inoffensive Californian hippy music, I find it neither very bad or very good, not in any way comparable to the awfulness of Zappa at his worst.

i love that every once in a while this thread gets revived for no particular reason but to talk about how vile and hateful so much of zappa's music is

and yeah i'd say zappa and the dead are completely unrelated, he made fun of the hippies once, but that was more like LA-SF rivalry than anything else. if there's a point of comparison to zappa i'd almost say prince. like, if prince thoroughly _hated_ women, held them in complete contempt, rather than the, uh, complex relationship he had with women and womanhood, then he might be similar to zappa in some ways. controlling, workaholic, using everyone around him as tools to accomplish his Creative Vision. oh and prince was also a way better songwriter than zappa, like, if he couldn't write songs but had taken a semester of composition at community college, decided that it was all bullshit and that he knew _way_ more about composition than any of those squares, got a letter from, i don't know, pierre boulez when he was 12 or something, and decided he was one of the greatest living composers without having actually heard any other living composers. then he might be kind of like zappa.

god, that comes of as pretty harsh, doesn't it? like i'm not actually trying to put zappa down here. he's just so fucking easy to hate!

Seems like the obsessive anality of their fans is the point of contact. I've never known a Grateful Dead fan though. I did know a Zappa fan once and at least I've known people who have some of his records.

I do think there's something cool about the sheer volume of material he produced, the way it all kind of relates to each other (like a long running sitcom), how his live shows recontextualized stuff from all over his catalogue and often featured new material and improvs, it often makes me wish I liked his music more. But I'm not gonna pretend he doesn't have some killer material in there, I mean even the stuff that sucks often has something cool in it - the middle section of "Jumbo Go Away" is pretty interesting but I hate the song so much that I can't even pay attention to it. Which I guess makes me the exact kind of square he was trying to piss off.

come to think of it I never really made it further than the first 15 minutes of Thing-Fish, maybe I should listen to it just to torture myself

Seems like the obsessive anality of their fans is the point of contact. I've never known a Grateful Dead fan though. I did know a Zappa fan once and at least I've known people who have some of his records.

― The Prime of the Ancient Minister (Tom D.)

seeee that's a _little_ more complicated for me given that i spent the entirety of my 20s and much of my 30s as an absolutely _obsessive_ zappa fan. and i mean ok, sure, i was annoying and autistic in the same way that, like, libertarian rush fans used to be (although in my defense, i will say that i was _never_ a libertarian). like yeah i had the "privilege" of being profoundly ignorant of, like. love? i mean i used to think it was cool that zappa had never written a love song. i thought of myself as being basically unloveable and awful and to me zappa was like, hey, who cares if you're ugly and repellent? love is STUPID! let's all be smart together and make fun of how stupid people who experience love are. and then when i was 33 i, like, actually got into a relationship for the first time in my life and zappa didn't seem so smart all of a sudden. i'm kind of starting to come around to the possibility that i'm not actually ugly and repellent, which is kind of funny really considering how hard some people go on the idea that trans women are ugly and repellent. mmmm-hmmm whatever you say there friendo.

i haven't actually heard "jumbo go away", or if i do i can't remember it. being fat myself i didn't exactly relish the idea of zappa going, like... you know who's had it too easy for too long, _fat people_, somebody needs to put _them_ in their place. like no sorry. like even in my most hardcore zappa days i had my limits. i tried listening to thing-fish once, basically because i figured it was so awful it had to be good, and it wasn't. i had sheik yerbouti on CD and good god i tried to like that one but i decided that "jewish princess" was not a song i ever needed to hear. those kazoos would kick in and within five seconds my brain would just say "NOPE" and i'd hit the "skip track" button.

the main reason i'm particularly down on "the illinois enema bandit" is, i think, because of the way it made me confront my own basic ignorance. like for whatever reason i was _really_ into the '88 band, i was absolutely convinced that the '88 band was, like, the best thing ever. zappa fandom at the time was all about that band. he released like five CDs of that band and honestly i, uh. don't know why i thought the '88 band was better than, like, the '82 band. but i did, and so i had dozens of bootlegs, and he basically _always_ played "the illinois enema bandit" as the last song. and it was just, like, an awful song. an awful song with a bad guitar solo and i never understood, still don't really understand, why he ended all his concerts with _that_ song. it wasn't a fan favorite. nobody really liked it but him. it was like if bob dylan made his final encore "silvio" for 20 years. i mean ok?

then i read ben watson's book, which, i'd never really read any leftist academic lit before so i found it extremely funny. leftist academic lit _is_ really funny and i agree with a lot of it, i'm really inspired by a lot of it. i feel like that's kind of cringe of me but you know, there are a lot more cringe things about me, like me having spent my entire 20s and the first half of my 30s as a die-hard frank zappa fan. anyway watson comes down really hard on "the illinois enema bandit" and i was just like, huh, i guess i'd never really thought about it that way, like maybe that's not just "misanthropic" but is actually kind of specifically misogynist.

you have to understand at that point i was too shy to, like, actually talk to women. and here's this guy who's just died and people are like wow total iconoclast, great composer, really smart, doesn't even _try_ to be "normal", truly, a man going his own way lol. like there was this whole culture where being a zappa fan was, like, the ultimate form of "weirdness". plus i'm super autistic and he's got like 70 albums and i'm like "oh boy! look at all the fun facts i could learn! pink floyd only have, like, 10 albums".

so he's doing this song about how all college educated women need to be sexually assaulted and i'm just like hmmmm i'm not so sure about that one frank, like i wished i could be college-educated and i wished i could be a woman but i didn't particularly wish i could be sexually assaulted. well i mean i kind of did but not in the same way i wished i could be college-educated and wished i could be a woman.

ANYWAY i wound up with the trifecta and look, i'll be honest with you. i do strongly recommend being college educated and being a woman, they're both great things, really difficult and challenging things for me, both of them, but totally worth it. sexual assault not so much. i don't really feel like that was something i "needed". anyway at some point i go "hey wait i'm a college-educated woman" and i'm kind of... kind of deeply ashamed of not having realized how utterly awful and repellent the song was before. and like so many things in my life frank zappa is someone who i really liked a lot for a long time and who i still really like in a lot of ways but is also awful and fucked up. i mean that's kind of the story of my life, to be honest.

idk how much that has to do with zappa but we start talking about the guy enough and i start talking about my personal trauma just because, fuck it, it's better than talking about zappa. talking about frank zappa is so depressing.

-

deadheads are cool. when i was a kid they were fucked up burnout junkies desperately chasing highs that stopped being actually enjoyable decades ago. a lot of my friends these days are fucked up burnouts so i'm a lot more ok with the dead. dead fans now are basically weird nerds who like jazz and are fascinated by the idea of "what if a bunch of fucked up stoners got so high they sort of accidentally started playing jazz sometimes"

which is the complete opposite of zappa who knew perfectly well how to play jazz, but hated jazz as much as he hated everything except '50s r&b

come to think of it I never really made it further than the first 15 minutes of Thing-Fish, maybe I should listen to it just to torture myself

― frogbs

i mean it's not actually interestingly bad. there are a lot of albums that are bad in interesting ways and this is, like. about as interesting as "summer in paradise".

search: FZ the composer, the guitarist, the bandleader who wrote/arranged for players' strengths; destroy: FZ the lyricist, the impresario, the bandleader who discarded players like kleenex, the workaholic

Great albums for enjoying FZ music because FZ was dead and couldn't stick his honker in: Ensemble Ambrosius, The Zappa Album; Omnibus Wind Ensemble, Music by Frank Zappa; Le Concert Impromptu, Prophetic Attitude; Ensemble Modern Plays Frank Zappa (2003); some Ed Palermo and Meridian Arts Ensemble stuff.

And side two of Roxy and Elsewhere.