THE MUSIC OF FRANK ZAPPA IS ABOVE ALL A PROVOCATION, A SMACK IN THE Face for public taste. Play one of his records, and you get an argument. His critics are legion, but then so are his fans. This guide doesn’t pretend to be unpartisan. For this writer, Zappa was second only to Hendrix as a rock guitarist – and as composer, producer, bandleader and interviewee, second to no-one in rock at all, thank you very much.
Luckily for us – now that he’s gone – Zappa spent most of his time on this planet down in his basement studio constructing those weird little artefacts called ‘albums’: cunning collations of sounds, words and visuals. His records were so detailed and crafted and packed that Zappologists around the globe are still unravelling them – but here they are, all present and correct, in a complete guide.
Towards the end of his life, Zappa was asked by Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening to expound on the concept of time. “I think that everything is happening all the time,” he replied, “and that the only reason why we think of time linearly is because we are conditioned to do it. That’s because the human idea of stuff is: it has a beginning and an end. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think of time as a constant, a spherical constant…” Zappa was delighted to find this idea in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time (this explains the dedication to Hawking in The Real Frank Zappa Book). Mystical? Bizarre? The weird thing is that the more you listen, the truer Zappa’s words become. In what he called his oeuvre, everything really does seem to happen all the time!
When Frank Zappa died, journalists had to come up with snap synopses. The usual one ran: ‘Sixties rock guitarist/scatologist who matured to become a classical composer and media spokesman’. This ignored the fact that Zappa composed scores before he even touched the guitar, and that everything he ever said or did – even when conducting symphony orchestras – had a satirical, media-bucking edge. When he unveiled something “new”, you could be sure that it was something he’d been thinking about for years, maybe forever; and that the indignation it would provoke was pre-echoed in advance, too.
In 1984 he released a triple-LP box-set named Thing-Fish, thesoundtrack of a ‘comedy musical’. Sack-cloth (or ‘burlap’) was reproduced all over the box and booklet. In 1969, Zappa had told Zigzag magazine about a musical called Captain Beefheart Versus The Grunt People; the Grunt People, he explained, ‘wear these clothes which are like burlap bags with fish and garbage sewn on them’. Did it ever dawn on the upstanding critics who condemned the ‘vulgarity’ of ‘Titties And Beer’ that its plot was actually a rewrite of ‘A Soldier’s Tale’ by revered classical composer Igor Stravinsky? In the mid-Eighties, Zappa ‘parodied’ The Channels’ 1956 doo-wop number ‘The Closer You Are’; did his teen metal audience know that he’d once released a whole album of this stuff (Cruising With Ruben And The Jets, 1969)? That in 1963 he’d written and recorded a song – ‘Memories Of El Monte’ – for doo-wop survivors The Penguins?
Like Mandelbrot’s fractals, every Zappa grotesquery springs from some tiny detail in previous work (the celebrated sex yarn ‘Dinah Moe- Humm’ was heralded by a phrase in the sci-fi story inside the booklet that accompanied Uncle Meat). Zappa’s cleverest trick – and one which still provokes frenzied speculation among Zappologists – was his ability to parody trends and music-biz absurdities before they appeared! Perhaps time is indeed an illusion…
Tracking Zappa’s references and details can turn apparently sane individuals into gibbering loons (hello Danny, hello Gamma), visionaries who scream with delight at any mention of poodles or dental floss (or fat floating sofas). However, it can be said in their defence that this madness is worth the trip because Zappa’s music is so wonderful: riven with deliriously beautiful tunes, non-standard, bracing rhythms and succulent, east-of-Vienna harmonies. Most music – most culture – is judged these days according to a list of “politically correct” precepts that are both prim and prissy. Zappa blows the PC moralist sky-high, offering his listeners lurid aesthetic experience instead. If the response is “I’m hip but of course I am offended” (as Zappa once characterised it), so much the worse for conventional mores and its blocked ears!
Despite his concept of time as a ‘spherical constant’, Zappa appreciated the travails of us linear, time-based mortals. And on December 4, 1993, Zappa’s death from prostate cancer was a pretty definite ‘end’. Yet his work endures, largely thanks to Rykodisc’s decision to keep the entire catalogue on the racks, but also in outfits both rockist(hello Muffin Men, hello Grandmothers) and classicising (hello Ensemble Modern, hello 10:10 Ensemble). Meanwhile, composers Simon H. Fell, Richard Hemmings and T.H.F. Drenching show that Zappa’s perverse eclecticism has broached a genuine tradition.
What follows examines the albums in the sequence in which they were released (mostly), setting them against the fads and peer-group conformities they ridiculed – while at the same time respecting Zappa’s ‘conceptual continuity’, his proposal that ‘everything is actually happening all the time…’ Good luck.
Ben Watson
1 April, 1998
THE GOOD FOLK AT OMNIBUS SAY THEY ARE GOING TO REPRINT THIS BOOK, so I’ve added a chapter about what has been released between 1998 and 2005 called ‘Posthumous Existence’. Otherwise, the text remains substantially the same, apart from the correction of a few typos and errors, and some updates and improvements (‘tweezing’ as they put it in G&S Music catalogues).
Ben Watson
1 April, 2005