Frank Zappa

Lately---during a somewhat difficult time---I’ve been keeping up my morale by, among other things, revisiting some music that I enjoyed once, or with which I had a passing acquaintance. I’ve a Michael Tippett opera that I’m listening to at home, which I'll write about soon, but in my car, I’ve been enjoying some Frank Zappa.

Zappa passed away in December 1993, just short of his 53rd birthday. I always knew of his innovative and iconoclastic music as well as his sharp satire and social criticism. In the early 1970s I owned one album, The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out. I thought it was strange, which it is, with its mixtures (and deconstructions) of pop, blues, concrete music, rock, barbershop quartet, and do-wop. In 1966 there were few if any concept albums, and few double-albums (this one is a debut album at that), and with the second disc (as one Amazon reviewer puts it), “all bets are off.” “Trouble Every Day” takes on the Watts Riots, “Help, I’m a Rock” satires Simon and Garfunkel, and the raucous final track, “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” we come to the album’s eponymous “freak out.” I was too young in 1972 to appreciate its innovations, although its political protests are quite apparent. "I'm not black, but there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white," spoke the singer on disc two. No missing the force of that sentiment during those times!

Over years, I’d occasionally find myself with a chorus stuck in my head, “No way to delay, that trouble comin’ every day.” Stopping by Euclid Records the other day, just down the street from me in St. Louis, I checked out their selection and decided to revisit Zappa and the Mothers. I picked Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy from 1969. A doctoral student friend had declared this a favorite album and he'd been looking for an affordable LP in used record shops. Joining surf music, concrete music, and spoken dialogue, the album is enjoyable the same way Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” and “Pharaoh’s Dance” are enjoyable---not real toe-tapping numbers, but innovative in the way tape editing is itself an indispensable aspect of the composition and performance. Zappa said that this album plus We’re Only in It For the Money, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, and Uncle Meat are essentially all one album that he could theoretically reedit in different ways. For some reason that resonates with me creatively: having several works being part of a larger whole. (A while ago I posted some thoughts about David Bowie, whose 1971-74 albums Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs formed a kind of "grand epic" in one critic's words.)

I went back to the shop and randomly purchased Hot Rats (1969), which now I’m playing all the time. So different from these other albums, this one anticipates the jazz-fusion music of the 1970s (Jean-Luc Ponty is a featured artist), with Zappa’s guitar-playing prominent. I’d seen this album so many times in stores---with the groupie Miss Christine staring scarily at the viewer---and am only just now enjoying it.

The modest moral to this story is: there is so much wonderful music to discover, if you take the time to do some exploring. Think about music with whom you had a passing, positive acquaintance, and then find out about other works of that artist. As they say, you'll be glad you did.