Original release: October 1976; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10523
FOR THE COVER OF ZOOT ALLURES, ZAPPA POSED IN UNREPENTANT fuck-off-to-punk flared trousers. However, as if acknowledging the threat looming on the horizon – this was the year The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash vowed to kill off rock ‘dinosaurs’ – he did surround himself with youth. A pudgy Patrick O’Hearn leans against the studio wall, while a fresh-faced Eddie Jobson looks on nervously, seated on a stool. The two were members of Zappa’s band that toured between October 1976 and March 1977, but neither played on the record! Seated on a stepladder, drummer Terry Bozzio – Zappa’s chief musical collaborator – looked still more boyish. Appropriately, the logo on his T-shirt read ‘Angels’ (the LA baseball team). Surrounded by all this cherubic innocence, Zappa looked dangerously swarthy and demonic (his trousers have an enormous bulge at the crotch). On the reverse (cropped in the Rykodisc CD booklet), the others hold still while Zappa does a stupid knee-bend (to ease phallic constriction?),as if mocking the whole charade. A Japanese transliteration of Zappa’s name appears on both sides.
The cover design of Zoot Allures was by Cal Schenkel, the photographs by Gary Heery, who had taken photos for Good Singin’ Good Playin’ by Grand Funk Railroad, an album Zappa produced at this time. One of the engineers for the vocals on that record, Davey Moire, sang lead on the opener, ‘Wind Up Workin’In A Gas Station’. This frenzied song about dead end jobs was a punk parody, though Terry Bozzio’s explosive polyrhythms were far from primitive.
‘Black Napkins’, named to commemorate the tableware at a promoter’s Thanksgiving dinner in Japan, was recorded at the Kosei Nenkin Kaikan in Osaka on 3 February, 1976. It is the only real time performance on the record. Zappa’s soaring, Santana-like guitar is the perfect tense intro to the lascivious echo chamber that is ‘The Torture Never Stops’. An audio snuff movie, this was the soundtrack to Zappa’s cover hard-on, and leads to ‘Ms. Pinky’, an ode to a sex aid shaped like a child’s head with an open mouth and built-in vibrators (the full explanation may be heard on ‘Lonely Person Devices’ on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol.6). Zappa might tease the listener with audio porn, but he does not glamourise the lonely pleasures it invites.
Like Bongo Fury, side two of Zoot Allures begins with sly, suggestive R&B aerated by Beefheart’s bluesy harmonica. ‘Find Her Finer’ is cynical advice about male approaches to women: ‘don’t let her know you are smart/the universe is nowhere to start’. Like the rest of the album, the pace is slow and sleazy, the sound reverberant and suggestive. ‘Friendly Little Finger’ was recorded using ‘experimental re-synchronization’, which meant combining tracks recorded at different times by musicians who weren’t listening to each other. Montage like this is a technique familiar from cinema. Though regularly employed in hip-hop and ambient today, it was rare in 1976. Back then, multi-tracking was a means of achieving a ‘perfect’ real-group emulation, not a tool for ‘experiment’: Zappa had to fight his engineers to do it. Zappa used the technique extensively on Joe’s Garage, when he called it “xenochrony” (alien time), floating his guitar solos over rhythm tracks that aren’t playing in the same time signature.
A snatch from the hymn ‘Bringing In The Sheaves’ introduces ‘Wonderful Wino’, a song originally recorded by Jeff Simmons on Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up: yet more sleaze and filth customised to offend the ‘clean-cut folks’. ‘Zoot Allures’ is astonishing; guitar, string harp and marimba are recorded with exceptional resonance. Although devoid of lyrics, the decadent atmosphere is coloured by the preceding songs. ‘Disco Boy’ satirised disco, but sounds more like Glam Rock. “You never go doody, that’s what you think,” leered Zappa, “leave his hair alone/but you can kiss his comb.” As usual, good looks and sartorial cool are dismissed as lack of sensuous engagement, a concession to peer pressure. Zappa details the misery of a failed sexual encounter, and recommends masturbation. Throughout the record, Zappa had quite literally – via overdubbing – been “playing with himself”: ‘Disco Boy’ is asmuch a cry of pain about the composer’s solitude and alienation as it is a satire of teen frustration (the Rykodisc release credits a ‘Sharkie Barker’ for background vocals on this track, rather than the original’s Sparkie Parker; it seems that even personnel details have been warped by anxieties about vagina dentata and woofing canines…)
Beneath their trademark ‘green-tinted’ disc-holder, Rykodisc included one of Cal Schenkel’s graphics from Zappa’s 1980 world tour programme: it shows sex aids and hardcore porn images rendered strange and abstract by misaligned lithography. Zoot Allures works the same way: experimental re-synchronisation of exploitative song forms results in unheard strangeness.
Original release: March 1978; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10524/25
ZAPPA IN NEW YORK WAS THE FRUIT OF COMPROMISE. ACCORDING TO Gail Zappa, Zappa originally conceived a 4-LP box-set titled Läther. Warner Brothers wouldn’t release such an expensive item, so he “reluctantly reformatted it” as four separate releases – Zappa In New York, Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites – and redelivered them. “Nothing like this had ever happened before,” says Gail. “No artist had cured his obligations by delivering all the albums required at once. They wouldn’t pay him. They wouldn’t release him.” But according to Paul Rambali (NME 28 January 1978) Zappa created Läther by ‘re-editing’ the four rejected albums (Simon Prentis’ sleevenote on Rykodisc’s posthumous release of Läther is noncommittal). Whatever the case, to show his anger at Warner Brothers, Zappa broadcast the two-and-a-half-hour Läther over the radio, telling listeners to tape it off the air.
One thing is clear: Läther is a bone fide masterpiece, a staggering fold-in of all Zappa’s styles – rock songs, orchestral interludes, chamber jazz, electric guitar – all segued between snippets of spoken word and effects in the manner of We’re Only In It For The Money. Zappa’s “reluctant reformatting” (or original delivery?) created releasesof greater generic coherence, but without the contrasts and scope of Läther.
Curiously, once Zappa had secured rights to his master tapes in the late ‘70s, he reissued the four albums as separate releases rather than as Läther, even retaining graphics he had no part in commissioning. Perhaps he felt it would be wrong to rewrite history, and that his oeuvre should comprise his records as actually released. Now, with the posthumous release of Läther, buyers can choose how they want to hear the music.
Of the four albums delivered to Warners, Zappa In New York was the only one with cover and sleevenotes supplied by Zappa. The CD issue has five additions, making it a two-disc release: ‘Punky’s Whips’ (originally omitted by Warners in case Punky Meadows, the target of Zappa’s satire, waxed litigious – though some pressings in England retained the track), ‘Cruisin’ For Burgers’, ‘Pound For A Brown’, ‘I’m The Slime ‘and ‘The Torture Never Stops’.
Zappa In New York opens with the ‘Titties And Beer’, a reductionist account of male priorities designed to outrage feminists. It was also an opportunity for Frank to goad drummer Terry Bozzio, who had to wear a rubber mask and play the part of the devil. In the version Zappa chose for release, their improvised dialogue includes: Zappa – “I’m only interested in two things. See if you can guess what they are.” Bozzio – “Let’s see now, maybe Stravinsky and…” Bozzio had a point. Back in 1972, Zappa had played the devil in a performance of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale at the Hollywood Bowl – ‘Titties And Beer’ is a rewrite of Stravinsky’s story. In the original, the soldier’s soul is represented by a violin. Zappa’s exclamation ‘Up jumped the Devil!’ is the name of an obscure tune recorded by violinist Stuff Smith in late 1949 or early 1950 (according to leading Stuffologist Anthony Barnett): “Don’t they pay you well for the stuff that you do?” Zappa asks Bozzio. Just as Zappa’s violinists (Sugarcane Harris, Jean-Luc Ponty, Eddie Jobson, L. Shankar, Ashley Arbuckle) leapt the classical/blues score/improvisation divide, so the devilry of ‘Titties And Beer’ conflates Igor Stravinsky with Stuff Smith.
‘Cruisin’ For Burgers’ transformed Uncle Meat’s dreamy nostalgia for teenage pleasures into a thunderous workout, each instrument pursuing a different rhythm. ‘I Promise Not To Come In Your Mouth’ was Läther’s title-track, with a tingling Moog solo by Eddie Jobson. ‘Punky’s Whips’ is one of Zappa’s most magical creations; Terry Bozzio’s homoerotic impulses are depicted with great subtlety. Electric guitar, horns and percussion combine in a totally original manner. Opera, but not as we know it, Giuseppe.
‘Honey, Don’t You Want A Man Like Me?’ is a finely-observed satire on mating-game rituals. In later performances, office-girl Betty’s favourite group changed from Helen Reddy – famous for the feminist anthem ‘I Am Woman’(1972) – to Twisted Sister, a ridiculous heavy-metal outfit (Zappa’s repartee to a heckler – “fuck you, Zappa!” – “and fuck you, too, buddy, fuck you very much!” – was removed from Zappa In New York, but appeared on Läther).
‘The Legend Of The Illinois Enema Bandit’ took off from a true-life court-case, developing into an epic of anal sadism as Zappa vents scatological fury against college-educated women. The scabrous, stinky suggestiveness of his guitar solo – positively reeking with coprophilic drives – illustrates the aesthetic advantages of using dubious subject matter. ‘I’m The Slime’ is a splendid, brass-driven arrangement of the song from Over-Nite Sensation, introduced by TV presenter Don Pardo. ‘Pound For A Brown’ became a concert stand-by over the years, Zappa’s equivalent to Duke Ellington’s ‘Caravan’; whereas the original Mothers pondered over its asymmetrical time signature, later bands found it a convenient testing ground for instrumental aromas.
‘Manx Needs Women’ and a new arrangement of One Size Fits All’s ‘Sofa’ are both magnificent deployments of amplified forces. ‘Black Page’ presented musical difficulty as a crowd-pleasing stunt, stripping off its trappings of class and sophistication. ‘The Purple Lagoon’ – the ‘music music’ fourth side of Zappa In New York’s original vinyl – had guests the Brecker brothers and Ronnie Cuber improvise over a rhythmic minefield. On Zappa In New York, rock power, jazz chops and classical organisation achieved an expressive pungency which ‘70s jazz-rock fusion was hard put to equal.
Original release: September 1978; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10524/25
STUDIO TAN PRESENTED TWO SIDES OF LÄTHER’S EIGHT SIDES. THE TWENTY minute ‘The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary’ was side eight, one of those epic productions with which Zappa liked to close a major work. For listeners repelled by Zappa’s vocal delivery – those who prefer Hot Rats to, say, Apostrophe(‘) – this album cannot be recommended: ‘Greggery Peccary’ is basically Zappa narrating a cartoon-style story aided by 1001 musical jokes and sound effects. As in ‘Billy The Mountain’ on Just Another Band From L.A., Zappa tells his story via a series of clichés that instantly trigger visual images (e.g. “acid burnt-out eyeballs” or “they park their cars in a pseudo-wagon train formation”). However, this is not a raucous band cracking jokes and ad-libbing on stage, but a meticulously crafted, multi-tracked wonder.
The Rykodisc edition credits a small band with George Duke, the Fowler brothers and Chester Thompson; strings, woodwinds, saxophone, orchestral chimes, marimba, xylophone all go uncredited. The fast flow of ideas is dazzling and could sustain pages of analysis.To take one example, the motif played after the words “flower power” is the “mongoloid folk-rock riff” Zappa deliberately built into ‘Tryin’ To Grow A Chin’ (a Läther song that first appeared on Sheik Yerbouti). According to Zappa’s doctrine that linear time is an illusion, Greggery Peccary “invents” the calendar, thus giving people the chance to find out how old they are. “What hath God wrought?” asks a voice, quoting the first words ever telegraphed (on 24 May, 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse tapped out the phrase – from Numbers 23:23 in the Bible – in Washington, D.C.; the coded words arrived instantly in Baltimore on punched paper tape). The cover of the Läther box pastiched the label on the wax cylinders manufactured in the 1890s by Columbia Phonograph Company using Thomas Edison’s new invention. For Zappa, our experience of time and space has been transformed by technologies of electrical signalling, recording and replay: human “reality” is a historical product. However, despite such deep thoughts (all delivered at the frantic pace of a Tom & Jerry cartoon), Zappa remains cynical about the motives of “philostophers” in explaining the world: whatever you ask, they’ll “seethat you pay. “Truth is a social conundrum, to be discovered in resistance to rip-offs and economic exploitation rather than by consulting pundits.
‘Revised Music For Guitar And Low Budget Orchestra’ is a glossy remake of the suite Zappa wrote for Jean-Luc Ponty’s King Kong. ‘Lemme Take You To The Beach’ is parodic surf pop with Grand Funk Railroad engineer Davey Moire on falsetto, Don Brewer on bongos and Eddie Jobson ‘yodelling’. ‘RDNZL’ is a mighty tune, glistening with bogus pomp. Its different sections stroke the passage of time in opposite directions, suggesting that the uniformity of clock time is not the whole story. Zappa’s solo has vim and lyricism, George Duke’s fulminous piano bouncing him up to ever-renewed heights.
The striking cover was by Gary Panter of Raw Comix, the first of three commissioned by Warner Brothers for the albums Zappa had delivered without artwork. It shows someone in a deck chair sweating under studio lights. When Rykodisc came to issue Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites in 1995, they got back in touch with Panter, who provided extra sketches to appear beneath the transparent inlay tray in each.
Original release: January 1979; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10527
SLEEP DIRT IS A COLLECTION OF THE LESS DEFINABLE MUSIC FROM LÄTHER, together with two extras: the title track and ‘Time Is Money’ (Rykodisc included the latter as a bonus on the 3-CD issue of Läther). There’s a lot of guitar – both acoustic and arena electric – but it’s not rock. There’s a lot of George Duke’s piano, but it’s not jazz. There’s a lot of score-playing, but it’s not classical. How to define it? Weird, certainly.
Originally, none of the tracks had vocals, but when it came to CD release, Zappa overdubbed soprano Thana Harris on ‘Flambay’, ‘Spider Of Destiny’ and ‘Time Is Money’(all songs from Zappa’s never-to-be musical Hunchentoot). Her strident, off-Broadway renditions disappointed fans of the original Sleep Dirt, so now the vinyl release is highly prized (though all three tracks appear without the vocal overdubs on Läther). Ina way, Harris’ singing makes the music less remarkable: the purely instrumental combination of jazz piano, staggered drums and rippling vibes was quite unprecedented.
‘Filthy Habits’ is one of Zappa’s strongest forays into guitar diabolism, an irresistible surge of overdubbing and feedback: barbaric, visceral splendours to make the blood boil. ‘Time Is Money’ used studio feedback for Zappa’s guitar and intimately-recorded double bass from Patrick O’Hearn, perpetrating something altogether weird. ‘Regyptian Strut’ overdubbed Bruce Fowler’s trombone into massed brass, creating the kind of Hollywood ‘epic’ fraudulence Zappa joked about on The Grand Wazoo. ‘Sleep Dirt’ is an acoustic guitar duet between Zappa and James ‘Bird Legs’ Youman (who replaced Tom Fowler on One Size Fits All when the latter broke his hand) – Zappa making silvery, lyrical assertions over Youman’s ostinato. ‘The Ocean Is The Ultimate Solution’ – originally named ‘One More Time For The World’ (a quote from ‘Tryin’ To Grow A Chin’) – proposes a new kind of studio music, where arena feedback guitar can solo over intimate acoustic bass and drums. The rhythmic flurries and disjunctures of Zappa’s orchestral composition are realised here through a different method – via musicians capable of the rhythmic push of rock and jazz. Like ‘Canard Du Jour’ on Shut Up ‘N’ Play Yer Guitar, this is the sound of Zappa in his home studio, achieving seriously evocative music with his favourite musicians.
Original release: March 1979; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10528
SHEIK YERBOUTI STANDS WITH THEM OR US AS ONE OF ZAPPA’S EPIC ROCK records – the title a pun on K.C. And The Sunshine Band’s 1976 disco hit ‘Shake Your Booty’. Zappa’s on-cover Bedouin tarboosh emphasized his ‘Sheik of Araby’ physiognomy. ‘I Have Been In You’ was a ribald rejoinder to Peter Frampton’s top-selling I’m In You, but it was also a stunning example of a state-of-the-art, three-dimensional studio-mix, with swooping choruses and an insinuating, close-miked vocal. The music is organised like cabaret, with different band members steppingforward to display their talents. On ‘Flakes’ for example, Adrian Belew (a guitarist Zappa had discovered performing Roy Orbison imitations in a Nashville bar) is unleashed on a Bob Dylan routine. Onstage, Belew had a crewcut and military fatigues with a sewn-on patch reading ‘Lt. Punk’. He brought a manic violence to Zappa’s music.
‘Broken Hearts Are For Assholes’ detailed the homoerotic implications of the leather concept, as well as the delights of heterosexual sodomy: “don’t fool yourself, girl/I’m gonna ram it up your poop chute” was sung to a dinky pseudo-reggae beat, giving it a surreal charm to those aware of Bob Marley and Burning Spear. ‘I’m So Cute’ was a ‘punk’ freak-out by drummer Terry Bozzio intercut with sped-up munchkin vocals listing his dietary fetishes (before Black Flag, “ginseng root” and “vitamin B’s” making you “cool and cute” was about as close Californians could get to the punk ethic). Mothers fans like Charles Shaar Murray and Savage Pencil, now in the thick of British punk, were aghast: how could Zappa be so wrong, so misinformed? When Bozzio split to form a New Wave band called Missing Persons, it was clear that Zappa’s satire was as prescient as ever; just that his listening post was Hollywood Boulevard rather than the King’s Road.
‘Jones Crusher’ set images of male sexual panic to rock’n’roll played at 78RPM; ‘What Ever Happened To All The Fun In The World?’ and ‘We’ve Got To Get Into Something Real’ were spoken-word/effects collages from Läther: intimate, angstvoll backstage chat that make the arena rock fury around them still more shockingly loud and public. ‘Rat Tomago’ was a guitar feature sliced from a live version of ‘The Torture Never Stops’ in Berlin.
‘Bobby Brown’, later a Top 10 hit in Norway and a biggie in German discos, was a locker room ditty that swiped at every kind of sexual option – set to a sumptuous melody. ‘Rubber Shirt’ was more “experimental re-synchronisation” (a technique debuted on Zoot Allures), a showcase for Patrick O’Hearn’s unctuous fretless bass. ‘The Sheik Yerbouti Tango’ is appropriately camp, the perfect soundtrack to Zappa’s flamboyant cover pose.
‘Tryin’ To Grow A Chin’ was suicidal teenage angst, Terry Bozzio wound up to a pitch of frenzy. In the same way that ‘Bobby Brown’ aligned degraded lyrics to incongrously beautiful music, ‘City Of Tiny Lites’ – another feature for Belew – coupled micro-hallucinations ofdomestic squalor to a soaring melody. Led Zeppelin would have had words about meadows and stars: as usual, Zappa is determined to show that immediate reality is more bizarre and fascinating than the romantic sublime.
‘Jewish Princess’ got Zappa in trouble with the Anti-Defamation League. He rebutted charges of anti-Semitism by writing an equally offensive song about his own racial type – ‘Catholic Girls’ (see Joe’s Garage). However, given his photo-portrait on the cover, it seems that Zappa is not so much denigrating ‘another’ race as expressing preference for oriental sensuousness versus white bread anaemia. You can chop these arguments around all day, but in terms of aesthetics, when Zappa describes “a garlic aroma that could level Tacoma” he is describing the pungency of his own art rather than making an accusation from a position of puritan cleanliness (he and Steve Vai had an expression “put garlic in your playing”, which meant using non-standard harmonies). Certainly, the way the song is introduced – pick-up phrases recalling the crowd scene in ‘America Drinks’ on Absolutely Free – shows that Zappa thinks racial characterisations are as dumb as astrology.
The arrangement of ‘Wild Love’ recalls Steely Dan, though the trademark marimbas doubling the melody line – a technique Zappa borrowed from Charles Ives – make it Zappaesque too. According to Adrian Belew, the lyrics for ‘Yo’ Mama’ were written as admonishment after he hadn’t learned the whole of ‘Little House I Used To Live In’ for a rehearsal. The guitar solo – recorded “in some little town outside of Nurnberg that I can’t remember the name of” and dropped in over an alien backing track, buttressed by extensive keyboard over dubbing courtesy of Tommy Mars – is one of Zappa’s most extreme statements. The playing bursts out of linear sanity into a torrid war zone of distortion and sonic event.
Original release: May 1979; CD release Rykodisc/RCD 10529
SIMON PRENTIS ARGUES THAT “LUMPED ALL TOGETHER, THE ORCHESTRAL Favorites album can sometimes feel too heavy to be fully accessible”, and says he prefers to hear the orchestral tracks segued amongst the songs and spoken word of Läther. The album was recorded at UCLA’s Royce Hall on 17 and 18 September, 1975, with a 37-piece orchestra conducted by Michael Zearott. Zappa achieved a muscular and forthright sound by using close-up mics and a multi-track mixing desk (instead of the pair of crossed mics favoured by classical purists),and by bringing in his own rhythm section: Dave Parlato on electric bass, Terry Bozzio on drums and Emil Richards on percussion.
At Royce Hall, ‘Pedro’s Dowry’ was preceded by Zappa narrating its programmed music story, a sequence of romantic cliches that ends in a “cheap little fuck” during which the couple, “accidentally knock over an ashtray. “The music is appropriately ‘cheesy’, with all kinds of movie score devices. ‘Naval Aviation In Art?’ is a short string study; ‘This Town Is A Sealed Tuna Sandwich’ is renamed ‘Bogus Pomp’, a perfect description of the tongue-in-cheek, mocking way that ‘classical’ effects are arraigned and subverted. This is a lost gem in Zappa’s oeuvre. His ear, practised in mixing in the studio, means that his score may deploy cliches, but he balances the sounds as if organising electronic music. His violins and clarinets sound like sine-waves, his piano like random chimes. The music is built out of a system of pauses and flurries. Zappa maintained that Edgard Varèse composed in the same way that Alexander Calder constructed his mobiles: by balancing sound blocks next to each other. You can hear Zappa do that on ‘Bogus Pomp’. Tricks like contact-miking the violin and playing it through a wah-wah pedal transform standard orchestral sound. Some of it sounds as if Zappa took an eraser to the score, omitting expected sections and thereby achieving new orchestral relations. Prentis may be correct that much of Orchestral Favorites is more ‘accessible’ on Läther, but ‘Bogus Pomp’ is not to be missed: the ‘Tuna ‘theme is forgotten as Zappa’s glistening timbres revolve round each other like cogs in a magnificent, crazy machine. The thirteen-minutes of ‘Bogus Pomp ‘finally twinkles off into xylophone chimes.
Released: September 1996; Rykodisc/RCD 10574/76
THE ORIGINAL LÄTHER PROJECT WAS FOUR VINYL ALBUMS PACKAGED IN a box. After Zappa broadcast it on the radio for home-taping on 31 October 1977, the music circulated among collectors as two C90 cassettes. When Rykodisc released it posthumously in 1996, Frank’s son Dweezil contributed a cover (a cow with markings that resemble the coastlines of Corsica, Italy and Sicily, home of Zappa Sr’s ancestors), Gail Zappa wrote the story of Läther’s “curing”, and Simon Prentis provided a track-by-track commentary. To make it a 3-CD release, ‘vaultmeister’ Joe Travers went into the tape archive at Zappa’s home and found some ‘bonus tracks’: spoken-word excerpts from Zappa’s ‘Bootleg this!’ broadcast, a remix of ‘Regyptian Strut’ Zappa made in 1993, a guitar solo called ‘Leather Goods’ (a snippet of which occurs on Läther proper during ‘Duck Duck Goose’), ‘Revenge Of The Knick Knack People’ (a ‘ballet for piano, percussion and tape effects’ recorded in 1978) and the non-vocal version of ‘Time Is Money’. However, discography complexities should not detract from the fact that, Civilization Phaze III notwithstanding, Läther was Zappa’s Vastest, Most Ambitious, Most Wide-Ranging And Most Complete Artwork. Ever.
Läther’s proper release was sabotaged from the very start, and already this Complete Guide has muddied the waters by treating the content of Läther in its piecemeal occurence on actual releases, rather than in its envisaged unity. Introduced by a confessional adolescent stuttering “l-l-leather!” Läther is an epic meditation on the meaning of rock music as a rite of passage in American society and hence raises all the relevant questions about cultural maturity and the place of sexual release and freedom in a society geared towards work.
In 1996, composer David Aldridge advanced the thesis that all of Läther’s music was based on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ (itself a steal, of course, from Willie Dixon’s ‘You Need Love’). On the 3-CD release, the ‘bonus track’ ‘Leather Goods’ – the source of Zappa’s citation of the ‘Whole Lotta Love’ riff on ‘Duck Duck Goose’ – makes Aldridge’s case still more persuasive: “this track hammers away obsessively at the three-note cell and acts as a palimpsest for Läther. Even its most experimentaltape collages find their source in the avant-garde noise-whirls at the centre of the Led Zeppelin track.” It is as if Zappa has held up a prism to the initial thrill generated by rock, and split it into all the sounds, impulses and possibilities it might harbour.
Aldridge gains independent confirmation from other Zappological arcana. According to Pamela Des Barres, the ‘mudshark’ story (see Fillmore East – June 1971 and Apostrophe(‘)) started with Led Zeppelin road-manager Richard Cole and drummer John Bonham’s exploits with a red snapper and a red-haired groupie. Fred Zeppelin was a mooted title for a Zappa album – backstage passes for the 1980 US tour were printed with the slogan ‘Fred Zeplinnn’, but Bonham’s death in September 1980 caused Zappa to shelve the idea. The version of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ on the 1988 tour – and its release as a 12” single with a cover photograph of staircases leading nowhere – showed that Led Zeppelin was an abiding obsession.
Apart from some of the inter-track collage material, all the songs and tunes of Läther eventually gained legitimate release: ‘A Little Green Rosetta’ became the epic final track of Joe’s Garage, while its closing guitar section (the coda to ‘Zoot Allures’ performed at Osaka on 3 February, 1976) became ‘Ship Ahoy’ on Shut Up ‘N’ Play Yer Guitar; ‘Down In De Dew’ appeared on a tape cassette issued by Guitar World; the title-track ‘Läther’ appeared on Zappa In New York as ‘I Promise Not To Come In Your Mouth’.
Läther remains a compulsive knot in Zappa’s oeuvre, such a fantastic, involuted conundrum that devotees end up purchasing all the other formats simply to have the pleasure of speculating about Zappa’s intentions. But it remains a moot question whether the real way to experience Läther shouldn’t be via the tape-swap ‘loop’ to which Zappa originally consigned it with his original radio broadcast: “you can have it for free, just tape it off the air… “