Original release: July 1966; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10501
WHEN FRANK ZAPPA MADE HIS DEBUT, HE HAD BEEN ACTIVE ON THE Hollywood music scene since graduating from high school in 1958. He’d scored movies (The World’s Greatest Sinner and Run Home Slow), played in bars (both lounge music in cocktail bars and R&B in rough-houses) and finally found the musicians he needed with The Soul Giants (Ray Collins on vocals, Roy Estrada on bass, Jimmy Carl Black on drums). He’d run his own studio in Cucamonga, producing novelty singles with engineer Paul Buff (‘Tijuana Surf’ was a hit in Mexico) and much experimental overdubbing on the then-new-and-untried multitrack tape-recorder. He’d also sold encyclopedias door-to-door and worked in the publicity department of a greetings card firm. In other words, Zappa wasn’t innocent of commercial manipulation; indeed his whole ‘anti-commercial’ schtick was predicated on the idea of how oppositional, non-conformist, freaky culture could attract attention and sell records.
Zappa’s band The Mothers (‘Of Invention’ was added at record company insistence in order to disguise the – thoroughly intentional – connotation ‘Motherfuckers’) were signed by MGM’s East Coast A&R Director, Tom Wilson. One of Harvard’s first black graduates, Wilson had produced both John Coltrane (a bizarre encounter with pianist Cecil Taylor) and the new, electrified Bob Dylan (including the momentous ‘Like A Rolling Stone’). When Wilson first caught The Mothers, guitarist Henry Vestine (later with Canned Heat) was aboard; they were playing an R&B number. However, Wilson warmed to Zappa’s ambitions and secured $25,000 to make his first record, which was to be a double album ($6,000 was a more normal budget at the time). Zappa drafted in studio musicians and scene-setting freaks to augment an already powerful rock band. Zappa appreciated Wilson’s commitment (“he laid his job on the line producing the album”); Wilson stayed with The Mothers until their fourth release (he can be seen in the front lineof the famous Sgt. Pepper-parody crowd scene of We’re Only In It For The Money).
Freak Out! was designed to inject a viral dose of intelligence, realism and antagonism into pop. Zappa had been impressed by the entry of Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’into the charts. Like him, he wanted to wake up the youth, make them question the high-school rigmarole of saluting the flag and attending the Prom: practices which all seemed to lead to military service in Vietnam and returning in a body-bag. Zappa wanted to demolish the world depicted in American Grafitti. Music was his weapon: loud, twangy, full of mayhem and electric guitars. A solarised photograph showed The Mothers glowering on the cover, Zappa in a filthy-looking fur coat. On the back, a high-school virgin named ‘Suzy Creamcheese’ tells us the band is crazy and that they all smell bad.
The recording quality sounds refreshingly rude and crude today, but Zappa was actually making the music as sophisticated – albeit as offensive – as possible. On the opener, ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’, clamorous lead guitar replicated the distorted riff of the Stones’‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. The lyrics point the finger at ‘Mr America’ and threaten a rising tide of non-conformism. Leering savagery threatens to capsize everything into cacophony.’I Ain’t Got No Heart’ purported to summarise Zappa’s ‘feelings in social-sexual relationships’, yet Ray Collins sounded eerily like a parody of Jim Morrison with The Doors (who were on the scene, but unsigned until later in the year). ‘Who Are The Brain Police?’ – Zappa’s ode to the authoritarian notion of thought crime – included a shocking moment of disorientation when Zappa dropped in a stretch of tape from a different recording (at 2.01). Like William Burroughs, Zappa was out to rattle his audience by splicing and subverting his technical means of representation. He wanted his listeners to question everything, including the ‘authenticity’ of his own art.
‘Motherly Love’ offered groupies a wild time. Since nothing was done to glamorise The Mothers – quite the opposite – the invitation explodes the usual hypocrisies that shelter teen pop and sexual matters. ‘You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here’ is audience abuse as funny and provocative as anything by The Sex Pistols ten years later. A quote on the sleeve compared Zappa’s approach to the ‘absurd’Plays of Samuel Beckett.
Zappa also included a quote by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse: ‘The present-day composer refuses to die!’ Zappa was later to show that his understanding of Varèse’s music was profound (despite name checks by many contemporary composers, there is little ‘classical’ music today that isn’t a retreat from Varèse’s hardcore 1920s modernism). Zappa’s trashing of commercial, Top 10 pop was not simply destructive; what sounds like Dadaist provocation – ‘Help I’m A Rock’ and ‘The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet’ – is also excellently-shaped modernist sound-composition (in other words, it repays repeated listening in a way that, say, ‘Revolution No 9’ on the Beatles’ double ‘White Album’ does not).
One subtitle – ‘Ritual Dance Of The Child Killer’ – referred to the plot of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite Of Spring. But in this scandalous context, with ‘Suzy Creamcheese’ (played by Jeannie Vassoir) sounding as if she were simultaneously losing her virginity and having an orgasm (this was the ‘60s), nobody noticed. Exploding the requirements of taste (the ‘good’ pop song; the ‘nice’ arrangement; the ‘serious’ composition) allowed him to recombine social icons with the experimental excitement of the medieval alchemist (or, in Zappa’s 50s pulp version, of the Mad Scientist clutching a test-tube of foaming goo.) Outrage backed by conscientious, innovatory composition, Freak Out! previewed the music Zappa was to make for the rest of his life.
Inside the album’s gatefold was a list of 184 names in eight columns of 23 (a number beloved of Samuel F.B. Morse, Aleister Crowley and William Burroughs). It provided the convert with a wealth of occasions for investigation and research. If Freak Out! had been all Zappa had ever released, it would have instigated a cult. As it was, it was just a start.
Original release: April 1967; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10502
FREAK OUT! SOLD JUST 30,000 UNITS; ACCORDING TO ZAPPA, MGM deemed the album a flop and the budget was reduced to $11,000 for its successor. Frank lost Elliot Ingber – the quintessential underground/psychedelic guitarist resurfaced as Winged Eel Fingerling in Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band – but gained other musicians to add to his Estrada/Black rhythm section: drummer Billy Mundi, saxophonist Bunk Gardner and keyboardist Don Preston. The latter’s father was resident composer for the Detroit Symphony; Preston grew up hearing the avant-garde classical music that inspired Zappa. He’d also played with John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones and toured with Nat King Cole.On top of that, he ran an avant-garde music club in LA, where he, Gardner and Zappa had improvised to films of microscopic pond life. Preston hadn’t played on Freak Out! because he “couldn’t play rock’n’roll.” Now, after gigging with a few rock bands, he was ready to join Zappa – and take avant-garde music to the masses.
Absolutely Free is a more challenging record than Freak Out!. Instead of three ‘freak out’ tracks appended to a brace of (albeit parodic) rock/pop numbers, everything is woven into two suites. First-time listeners find it hard to believe that this wild melange of spoken-word, political wisecracks and atonal (tuneless?) vocalising can become a favourite, but repeated listens reveal wonders. On the opener, Richard Berry’s immortal ‘Louie Louie’ is used as a backing for a denunciation of the hypocrisies and repressions of straight America. ‘The Duke Of Prunes’ and ‘Call Any Vegetable’ are terrific melodies. Given the album’s atmosphere of outrage, such felicities were rarely remarked. ‘Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin’ was Zappa’s first extended guitar workout: over a static polychordal drone, he showed that he had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of his idols (Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown and Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson), transforming their rocking guitar breaks into a counter-cultural manifesto.
‘The MOI American Pageant’ (side two of the vinyl album) provided further indictment of the lameness of America. It still has no parallels for widescan awareness and indignant spleen. Musical motifsand verbal/political rhetoric are so brilliantly entwined it seems insufficient to call ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ a ‘song’: bassoons, violins and electronics constructed a seething mosaic of contemporary ills (Zappa himself only achieved anything like it again in 1985 with ‘Porn Wars’). A plethora of tape splices showed Zappa’s awareness of musique concrète, the avant-garde music that appeared in Paris after the war where composers used tape-recorders to organise sound. Zappa regretted that primitive mass production (analogue vinyl) meant that many key exclamations from the closing portrayal of bar-room desperation were lost.
On the CD reissue, a contemporary single has been sequenced between the two suites: ‘Big Leg Emma’ b/w ‘Why Don’t You Do Me Right?’ The latter is notable because of the cover made of it by Mark P’s punk band Alternative TV: rockist ‘Louie Louie’ dumbness transcends generational warfare. A pointed message in Zappa’s cover collage – ‘War Means Work For All’, coupled with an atom-bomb mushroom (between the ‘Y’ of Absolutely and the ‘F’ of Free) – was originally toned down by MGM. In the shrunken graphic of the CD issue, it is illegible.
Original release: May 1967; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10504
LUMPY GRAVY HAS A SPECIAL PLACE IN THE ZAPPA oeuvre; HE CITED IT AS his favourite, and Civilization Phaze III, the magnum opus that occupied his last years, was meant to be its completion. It also constitutes Zappa’s most extreme refusal of conventional formats. Although commissioned by Capitol Records to ‘write something for an orchestra’ – to the tune of $40,000 – Zappa also included eerily twee arrangements of jolly melodies, bursts of guitar distortion, sped-up interludes, musique concrète and bizarre discussions by people who had been placed inside a piano. Whichever way you look at it, Lumpy Gravy was begging for commercial rejection. Although many of its procedures – collage, fragmentation, parody, humour, documentary – have since become requisites in ‘postmodern’ music academies, Zappa’s formal writing was too brash and gutsy for contemporary classical recognition.
Lumpy Gravy’s back cover showed Zappa – in tuxedo and top hat, his non-WASP, Mediterranean physiognomy leering into the camera – asking “Is this phase 2 of We’re Only In It For The Money?”. Lumpy Gravy was designed as a companion volume to the next release; working as its subtle, poetic, allusive counterpart (it even shares a small oasis of calm, romantic orchestration).
Towards the close we hear Zappa say “Cos round things are… are boring.” Then he exhales, as if blowing out smoke. The listener is spiked with poetic discontent, pondering a list of ‘round things’ (smoke rings, circular logic, repetitive labour, records…). Despite his persistent condemnation of drugs, Zappa’s Dadaist attack on the workaday mundane was universally interpreted as dope-fuelled fantasy. In fact, no dope-head could have summoned the skill and energy to construct Zappa’s surrealist monstrosity. When the slogan ‘Round Things Are Boring’ reappeared on the cover of One Size Fits All in 1975, Zappa’s dedicated, no-detail-missed fans felt vindicated. Here was an art deliberately engineered to repay obsessive investigation. Lumpy Gravy appeared in the US album charts for just one week – at 159. Nevertheless, simply because of its refusal to be measured by any external standard, the album remains one of the great moments of Modern Art: a riot of intricately-crafted indulgence that reproaches every time-serving orthodoxy, every time-server in the music biz.
Original release: September 1968; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10503
WHEREAS FREAK OUT! OPENED WITH AN AFFRONT MASQUERADING AS a pop song, Money opens with a section of consummate musique concrète which sounds like a belch. Zappa immerses the listener in a sonic collage that guys the stuttering inarticulacy of the hippie subculture: “… er…”, “… er…”, “are you hung up?”, “… out-a-sight, yeah.” Zappa’s satire is balm to the soul of anyone who has suffered drugcrippled fashion victims. Leon Trotsky argued that history writing should be engaged, partisan: Zappa’s portrayal of youth culture has a similar charge. He makes you take sides. At the height of Flower Power, when Allen Ginsberg’s combination of never-never nirvana and lust-for-youth erotics had been embraced by The Beatles (and the editors of rock magazines all over the world), Zappa launched a barrage of objections.
Zappa always maintained that the freaks of LA were superior to the hippies of San Francisco. He was incensed that Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead were hailed as countercultural heroes. According to him, their music ‘wasn’t even as funky as the little R&B combo I had in high school’.’Who Needs The Peace Corps?’ ran through a list of Frisco cliches: Augustus Stanley Owsley III, the scene’s acid-maker; the ‘psychedelic dungeons’ that were the hippie clubs; Bill Graham’s celebrated venue, the Fillmore. Zappa’s criticism of the hippies wasn’t just grouchy: it was urgent and political. ‘Concentration Moon’ made warnings about the internment camps Richard Nixon was readying for non-conformists, while ‘Mom And Dad’ was a chilling premonition of how establishment forces would respond to the anti-war movement (in 1970, when the National Guard fired at protestors at Kent State University, Zappa’s lyric became a bloody reality). ‘Absolutely Free’ mocked Flower Power by comparing its psychedelic imagery to the names of the reindeer in Johnny Marks’ banal seasonal hit ‘Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer’.
Money concluded with ‘The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny’, an outrageous sonic-montage designed to outdo George Martin’s ‘mind-blowing’ orchestration at the end of Sgt. Pepper. New Mother Ian Underwood was a prize-winning interpreter of Mozart; Zappa used his subtle touch for one of his own études. Yet the piano is recorded with such percussive realism it becomes as bizarre as the accompanying sped-up laughter and Stockhausen-like electronics (tamboura and koto twangs fed through oscillators and faders).
The sleeves of Lumpy Gravy and We’re Only In It For The Money announced the arrival of Cal Schenkel, Zappa’s most suggestive visual interpreter. Schenkel understood the Dada aesthetic. He projected Zappa’s interactive, multiplying detail onto the visual plane, providing countless motifs for the conceptual-continuity sleuth. His famous Sgt. Pepper parody was photographed by Jerry Schatzberg in his New York studio; The Mothers were flanked by Tom Wilson on one side, and Jimi Hendrix on the other. A photo of manager Herbie Cohen’s daughter Lisa was placed in Hendrix’s arms. Frank’s wife Gail, pregnant with daughter Moon Unit, wore a blue glitter dress. MGM’s lawyers insisted on printing bars across the eyes of anyone in the collage who was still alive: their paranoia simply made it still more sinister. Zappa made sure MGM used the same printers who had printed the US release of Sgt. Pepper: the colours and feel were perfect. In the sleevenotes, Zappa advised listeners to read ‘In The Penal Colony’, a short story by Franz Kafka that dealt with homoerotic abuse, colonialism and military/judicial atrocity. Money remains a disturbing experience to this day.
Original release: November 1968; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10505
IN THE MIDST OF OPENING UP POP TO EVERY SUBVERSIVE MANIFESTATION of modern culture, Zappa recorded an album of retrospective nostalgia. It harked back to the doo-wop of the 50s. Ruben And The Jets, he declared, was constructed in the spirit of Stravinsky’s neo-classical works (‘Fountain Of Love’ faded out on a riff derived from The Rite Of Spring): a simulacrum. Cal Schenkel’s graphics reinforced the sense of schizophrenia: a photograph of The Mothers shatters to reveal an impersonal universe of Victorian plumbing, printed circuits and spacerocket attachments.
Zappa toyed with the idea of deliberately scratchy, lo-fi sound, but settled for compressed sonorities that emphasise the mechanical nature of the music. On ‘Stuff Up The Cracks’, the singer gases himself. The whole record is about claustrophobia and asphyxiation – as a voice says on ‘Later That Night’: “there’s no room to breathe in here.” This applied to both the closeted ‘50s mentality and the restricted nature of the music.
Ruben And The Jets is the only Zappa album that critic Greil Marcus has time for. Though this demonstrates the perils of allowing Dylanologists to voice musical judgments, it does prove that Ruben is more than condescending parody. When legendary Zappologist Danny Houston bought the record, he went home and cried his eyes out to it. Cemented inside the paper-thin walls of Ruben’s satirical multi-tracks there is a layer of genuine doo-wop soul. Vocalist Ray Collins never sang better. Unfortunately, the digital release has double bass and drum parts overdubbed in 1984 by Arthur Barrow and Chad Wackerman (except for ‘Stuff Up The Cracks’), a decision Zappa did not reverse under fan pressure (as he did for We’re Only In It For The Money). Find the vinyl if you can.
Original release: March 1969; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10506/07
ZAPPA WAS STILL PRINTING EDGARD VARÈSE’S QUOTE ON HIS ALBUMS – “The present-day composer refuses to die!” – but so far his talent for outrage had obscured his skills as a composer. Uncle Meat aimed to set that right, a double-vinyl release that downplayed lyrics. “Basically this is an instrumental album,” it said inside the gatefold. A note described the technique of overdubbing, which was used extensively, opening up the weird world of virtual orchestration. New recruits Art Tripp and Ruth Komanoff (later Underwood) were classically-trained percussionists. They helped Zappa realise some of his fiendish metrical ingenuities. Ian Underwood played harpsichord; a jangling, absurdist quality infuses all the music. Uncle Meat became a great favourite in Europe, and almost singlehandedly gave birth to the genre ‘Art Rock’. Although Canterbury Rock and Henry Cow might have fused Stravinsky, rock and ‘pataphysical’ absurdity without Zappa’s example, it seems unlikely. Fred Frith cites ‘Nine Types Of Industrial Pollution’ as an inspiration, especially for the way the guitar was recorded.
One-time house-mate Pamela Zarubica appeared as the ‘Voice Of The Cheese’. Zappa takes the listener from domestic intimacy to rockvenue spectacle in breathtaking lurches. On Lumpy Gravy spoken word segued into music as if notes were expressions of the sub-verbal; on Uncle Meat the cleavage between private and public becomes glaring. A live recording of Don Preston playing ‘Louie Louie’ on the Royal Albert Hall organ – to wild applause – symbolised every desecration Zappa wished to perpetrate on old-world values. For good measure, The Mothers also murdered ‘God Bless America’(an equivalent statement to the distortions Hendrix was applying to ‘The Star Spangled Banner’).
‘The Air’ had lyrics about customs searches and tape recordings. Drummer Jimmy Carl Black can be heard bitching about band policy and pay. On an early version of Uncle Meat aired on German radio, Black can be heard saying ‘Is that thing on?’ Zappa answers ‘No’. This exchange was omitted on the final release, but it showed Zappa’s awareness of the power relations of recording. As Zappologist Jonathan Jones has pointed out, this was appropriate in a period that culminated in Watergate and the impeachment of a US president on the basis of illicit tape-recordings.
On the original vinyl, side four was occupied by six different versions of ‘King Kong’ (Zappa’s splendid 3/8 ode to the abused gorilla). This became a regular feature of his double-vinyl albums: a concluding side of ‘music music’. For the CD reissue, to make it a double-disc release, half-an-hour of the soundtrack to the movie Uncle Meat was added. This detracts from the album’s lustrous statistical density (those wishing to experience the album in its original form should program disc two from ‘King Kong Itself’ onward). Gratifyingly, the CD reissue includes a reprint of the original booklet, with such essential items as the scores for ‘Uncle Meat’ and ‘King Kong’, a diagram of a doll foot as a young rifle, references to Captain Beefheart’s contemporaneous masterpiece Trout Mask Replica, plus Zappa’s first foray into science fiction: speculation about how the media dictate our sense of time. Beneath Zappa’s B-movie cliches boils a Burroughs-like paranoia.