New reflections on Frank Zappa

 

FRANK ZAPPA

 

I’ve been watching a documentary, Zappa, about Frank Zappa that I found on YouTube, covering his life and career from beginning to end, and though the basic outlines of his story is familiar to me, there is still a bunch of stuff in this documentary I didn’t know about and it’s fascinating to hear his interviews and the views from his musical collaborators, wife and other people who knew him. Zappa comes across, as so many artists do, as a contradictory person who could be both aloof and cold yet also warm, friendly and supportive; single minded in his pursuit of what he saw as excellence; technically proficient as musician and composer yet with a low brow sense of humour in his parodies; a loyal husband but not averse, by his own account, to taking advantage of the benefits “road ladies” offered him; and so on.

 

Zappa might have started out as a rocker, sort of, influenced by rhythm ‘n blues records, the unorthodox compositions of Edgar Varese and jazz, but soon became and ambitious composer himself and was probably more focused on orchestral music by the end of his life (in 1993) than he was on his brand of iconoclastic jazz rock. There was a concert of orchestral music, released posthumously on record as The Yellow Shark, which seemed to be some kind of culmination and acceptance, at last and too late, of Zappa’s ambition to ascend to the ranks of highly rated modern composers.  There are several scenes in the documentary where he refers to the expense of getting a proper philharmonic orchestra to perform his music, which made such an endeavour unfeasible, at least for a guy like him who would’ve wanted to do it himself to retain full control.  Up to the last concert, Zappa could draw large audiences for his rock concerts but who knows how many people outside of the rock fans would’ve wanted to attend an orchestral evening so that it would be financially worthwhile, even if that means simply breaking even?

 

My relationship with his music is ambivalent. I’m not a huge fan but I do like some of his stuff and I’ve acquired or at least listened to, a fair amount of his output. He was a hero to various members of my peer group at University, when I was still more interested in blues and loud, fast rock, presumably because Zappa’s compositions weren’t pop, not quite prog, but fused jazz, rock, symphonic ideas with his unique musical vision that was tailor made for young people with an intellectual interest in music.

 

Tracks like “Peaches en Regalia” and “Son of Mr Gren Genes” off Hot Rats (1969) and “Cosmik Debris” and “Stink-foot” off Apostrophe (1974) received airplay on South African rock radio, and Chris Prior was particularly fond of  and he also favoured.  Of course, Zappa wasn’t a commercial rock act and only the DJs who were into and promoted. prog rock sounds, deigned to play his music and this probably gave him plenty of underground cachet amongst those who sneered at top 40 radio hits.

 

I bought a Warner Brothers “twofer” double set of Hot Rats (1969) and Chunga’s Revenge (1970), both credited as solo Zappa records, because it was cheap and seemed to be a low risk entry into the oeuvre.  I’d heard “Peaches en Regalia” and “Son of Mr Gren Genes” on the radio, read about Hot Rats in NME where it was described as a work of jazz rock genius and my mates at University seemed to rate it.

 

Frankly, during the early ‘80s, when I bought the double set, I listened to the records a few times and then set them aside. It took a few decades before I truly appreciated the music but even then it was never love, only appreciation. Hot Rats was kind of the jazz from hell (to quote Zappa out of context) album and Chunga’s Revenge seemed almost orthodox rock by comparison.

 

My prevailing memory of Zappa's music is the ubiquitous presence of the vibraphone (I always just thought of it as an adult xylophone) and the weird time signatures and tempo changes that may have been indicators of a very sophisticated technical ambition and proficiency but didn’t impress or appeal to me very much. The best parts on these two records, apart from some Captain Beefheart vocals, were the Zappa guitar solos. He had a forceful, supple and melodic style that was recognisably Zappa and satisfyingly tough.

 

A mate lent me Bongo Fury (1975) (which I taped) and the tracks I got into immediately were the Beefheart songs and album closer, “Muffin Man” but over time, and possibly because I played the tape far more often than I did Hot Rats, the record grew on me and it’s still a favourite. Zappa’s humorous lyrics aren’t just pointedly political but he plays a lot of searing guitar solos, especially an extended rave up on “Advance Romance.”

 

The Beefheart songs like “Bongo Fury” and “Sam With Showing Scalp Flattop” were weird and compelling and  Zappa’s  “Poofter’s Froth, Wyoming Plans Ahead” and “Muffin Man” were funny and compelling. My main impression of Zappa as a lyricist is that he does want humour to belong in music and is not afraid to be mordantly funny as a reflection of his own peculiar world vision.

 

I was always under the impression, amongst the bohemian coterie of my extended friend group, that I was alone in my lack of enthusiasm for Frank Zappa’s music. I was the philistine who failed to have intellectual appreciation for high art tock music, prog rock by any other name.

 

In the early ‘90s a member of my extended friend group and a chemical engineer with bohemian flair, was so heavily committed to his own personal Frank Zappa obsession that he went to a great deal of trouble in the pre-Amazon.com world to source and import the video cassette tape of the Zappa concert movie Baby Snakes probably directly from Zappa's business enterprise.

 

The story of the efforts to find and purchase this apparently elusive video, which wasn’t available in South Africa at all, was an epic saga for many a braai and beer evening.

 

When the guy finally got his sweaty hands on the video tape, he invited a bunch of us around to the house he was then renting on Red Hill, in the Simon's Town area, for a gala premiere viewing of the movie. I don’t know what he paid for the video but it wasn’t cheap, not to mention shipping costs, and the effort alone probably justified such a grand gesture. Having shared the tale of the quest with us for so long, it was only right to let us see what the fuss was about. 

 

A small group of us assembled in the lounge in front of the large screen tube television set. Some smoked joints, some drank liquor, all were jolly.

 

Baby Snakes (1983) is a concert movie (from Hallowe’en 1977) of the late ‘70s Zappa band with Terry Bozzio on drums and Adrian Belew on guitar and a bunch of the usual musical suspects of Zappa’s gang of the era. They were probably the cream of the jazz and off-centre rock world that paid no heed or mind to the punk revolution and in a fashion were at least sartorially and tonsorially close cousins to the Parliafunkadelicment Thang operating at the same time. The movie also has quite astonishing (for a first time viewer like me) stop-motion clay animation footage by Bruce Bickford. 

 

Baby Snakes didn’t entertain me. There was too much of the fleet tempo with intricate chord changes type of music most Zappaphiles apparently adored as an epitome of excellence. The japery between songs wasn’t that funny. You had to have been there and wasted too. This may not have been prog rock but it sure as dammit sounded like Zappa's personal version of it with less of the  pretentious “poetry” of standard prog rock lyrics and more of the sarcasm with which he viewed the world, and the stupid on stage joking. In any event, the movie is just a live show with a band whose members looked odd and acted weird and who concentrated on playing Zappa's intricate music. Perhaps, I would take a different view of proceedings if I were to see the movie today. Back then it did not persuade me to pursue the oeuvre of Francis Zappa.

 

Some years before, perhaps as part of the University of Stellenbosch film club or maybe at the Labia theatre on Orange Street in Cape Town, I had the dubious privilege of watching an old, pretty bad print of 200 Motels (1971), the “surreal documentary” that notably featured Ringo Starr in a strange page boy haircut and tight-fitting polo neck sweater, impersonating Zappa.

 

Apart from a scene of Starr dangling from the ceiling in some kind of elastic rope contraption I have absolutely no recollection of the contents of the movie. I do remember wondering why on earth I’d paid money to see this shit.

 

200 Motels is one of the few movies I did not understand at all and almost walked out of. To me, this movie was a big put on that Zappa was allowed to perpetrate because of the perception of his alleged genius but without any presence of sense or intelligence and that it was a simple case of the hubris that afflicted so many rock stars at the time, believing that they were Renaissance men who could do anything and everything and that their audience would lap it up.  Maybe 200 Motels is an underappreciated work of visionary genius that I’ve somehow misunderstood but I’m okay with that.

 

Chris Prior. “the Rock Professor,” who had a long running late night show on Radio 5 in which he could, at least initially, play what he wanted,  was, and may still be, quite fond of Zappa, and regularly played “Don't Eat The Yellow Snow”, “Cosmik Debris” and “Stink-Foot.”  These tracks made me think of Zappa as a kind of stand-up comedian who also played guitar and composed intricate musical pieces, rather than as a straightforward rock musician. I guess Zappa was never a straightforward rock musician anyway.

 

He had too much of an interest in serious music, famously influenced by Varese and the ambition to write his own “highbrow” music for appreciation outside of the rock audience, to be just a simple rock and roller. 

 

I don’t know why Prior never played the title track from Apostrophe (‘), as it’s a really wild and solid guitar and bass (and drums) master class jam between Zappa and Jack Bruce, as if they’re trying to show where Cream might have gone to if Eric Clapton had been as much a jazzer as Bruce and Ginger Baker.

 

This mid-‘70s period Zappa, though, with Bongo Fury and Zoot Allures (1976), produced the Zappa music I most like. I heard “The Torture Never Stops” from Zoot Allures at Sygma Records when the sales guy played it over the public address system and fell in love with the song. The combination of Zappa's slow, deep, tactile voice and the weird-funny lyrics were captivating. The main reason I didn’t buy the record then, other than financial, was that Frank Zappa's music in general was not to my taste at a time when I was into Bachmann Tuner Overdrive, Cream, Dr Feelgood and Golden Earring.

 

Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch (1982) contains the surprise hit single “Valley Girl” featuring Zappa's daughter Moon  and was pretty much party rock with social commentary about a newly defined American teen age social type. I bought a cassette tape version of the album in 1983 or 1984, at a record sale somewhere, because I recalled a Time magazine piece about the song when it was a hit.

 

The music in general is pretty much standard Zappa with the added presence of Steve Vai. He became the premier killer speed metal jazz guitar guy of the Eighties (who played the “impossible parts”) and the kind of guitarist whose technical proficiency I can appreciate and whose lack of emotional depth in his playing I deplore. Anyhow, Ship Arriving Too Late … is an enjoyable record with a great deal of emphasis on close harmony and even quasi operatic vocals and the force of a tight band.

 

At some point between 1996 and 2004, when I still had a turntable, I borrowed copies of Over-nite Sensation (1973) and One Size Fits All (1975) from a mate to investigate what critics apparently believed to be a couple of masterpieces and that I hadn’t heard yet. Both these records feature musicians I think of as the ever changing jazz rock troupe de luxe Zappa used after he disbanded the Mothers of Invention that plays the complicated, variable time signature, over-complex music that put me off Zappa for so long. Everything is technically proficient; I didn’t experience much excitement in the product and it was all much of a muchness. 

 

If one looks at the Zappa discography, there is a hell of a lot of Zappaproduct available, apparently 62 albums over 30 years and about as many official posthumous releases. in the Zappa documentary Frank takes a camera crew into a room (a vault?) with archival recordings (tapes stored in neatly marked boxes) of his entire career, both studio and live recordings, including collaborations with other famous musicians. It seems as if the Zappa Family Trust that now controls his artistic heritage could release a album  a year over the next hundred years, if the quality of the work suffices though, given what one learns about Zappa’s view of and approach to his work, Frank himself might not be satisfied with the way in which his unreleased work sees the light of day.

 

In the early ‘90s I saw a series of CD albums at flea market stalls featuring music from live concerts from the ‘70s and ‘80s. at the time I thought they were “legal” bootlegs but they might’ve been authorised releases from the vault. I never bought them, so I never found out how authorised they were.

 

Frank Zappa had a unique, distinctive smooth and soaring guitar style not a million miles removed from the distinctive Carlos Santana sound and it always amazed me that a guy I thought of more as a composer, lyricist, musical director and band leader could play guitar that well. I enjoy his singing voice and prefer him over most of the vocalists he used over the years, except for Beefheart, of course. The humorous, satirical songs, at least the best of them, are still funny and still captivating and deserve immortality.

 

Perhaps, I should invest in Strictly From Commercial, the “best of compilation” released after Zappa's death, to have a collection of the best moments of a long and productive career. On the other hand, perhaps I should simply buy Hot Rats, Apostrophe (') and Zoot Allures. 

 

Sheik Yerbouti and the Joe's Garage albums were commercial success of sorts but I wouldn’t want to own too many Zappa records. The schtick might pale after a while if one is exposed to too much of what the man put out there. Technical proficiency is not the be all and end all of good rock. 

 

It seems to me that Zappa was too intent on being the modern composer and showing off that he was intellectually streets ahead of not only the human race in general but his peer group of musicians in particular. The thing is: rock and roll is often at its best when it's a tad dumb, simple and direct. Zappa never seemed to appreciate the “less is more” approach. Perhaps rock has to have someone like that to contrast with the trite and banal and perhaps it was once important to be able to show that rock wasn't just three chords and mindless boogie but ultimately rock should be visceral and not overtly intellectual and calculated and that is where Zappa leaves me cold. I just don’t like jazz rock all that much and technical virtuosity makes no nevermind to me if the music doesn't speak to my heart. Also, I’m not a fan of marimba/vibraphone/xylophone in rock.

 

Apart from his sometimes bilious invective against flower power and general reactionary repression, and whatever else Zappa considered stupid and petty, and the amazing ensembles he led, and the vast, eclectic body of work he left behind, Frank Zappa is also known for naming his children Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva.  God knows why he thought he had to avoid non-controversial names. I would never have thought that the name Dweezil (even with the surname Zappa) could be of any benefit to any kind, unless it was the “boy named Sue” principle.

 

Apparently Dweezil is as much a monster guitar player as his father and had a lesser rock career once but is now relatively quiet although he tours with the Zappa Plays Zappa “tribute” show dedicated to his father's music. 

 

Who knows what happened to Moon, Ahmet and Diva? Okay, WikiPedia to the rescue. Moon is an author musician and actress and is married to the drummer for Matchbox 20.  Ahmet Emuukha Rodan Zappa is a musician, actor and novelist.  Diva Thin Muffin Pigeon (I bet the process of finding suitable names for the kids must have been a great source of undiluted fun in the Zappa household) is a musician, actress and artist. I guess one could not expect Frank Zappa's children to live quiet, uneventful suburban lives as wage slaves.

 

The fact that Frank Zappa recorded soundtracks for admittedly low budget movies and rented a studio for his private recording delight, long before he enjoyed any level of commercial success, must illustrate the ambition the young Zappa had and perhaps also that he would always be somewhat different to the rest of his peers, if he had peers. I cannot think of anyone else toiling in the same field as Frank Zappa or following in his footsteps. He is probably a unique phenomenon but due for revisiting, reviving and emulation.

 

Way back before MP3 downloads started killing off record companies, Zappa was unique in controlling his own destiny by marketing his product through his label Barking Pumpkin. If he'd lived to see 2010, Barking Pumpkin would have been (if it isn't already) a website with plenty iTunes style downloadable content from the back catalogues. 

 

As an artist Zappa was as close to a Renaissance man as a rock musician could get. He wrote music and lyrics and performed with a band as band leader, singer and guitarist. He wrote rock, jazz and orchestral instrumental music. He was prolific in his release schedule.  His bands didn’t sound like anybody else I’ve yet heard.

 

I must admit that Frank Zappa is the kind of artist I admire more than like, mostly because his music is generally not visceral enough for my liking. If the jokes don’t work, I don’t care much for the rest of it. By and large Zappa's music has had to grow on me before I could begin to appreciate it and he is therefore the polar opposite of, say, Dr Feelgood, whom I unreservedly loved from the first note of “I Can Tell,”  the opening track off Malpractice, and who I still unreservedly love, at least for their Wilko Johnson led albums. 

 

When I heard the Hot Rats album for the first time I was in my late teens and (at least theoretically) into punk and very much into blues. “Peaches En Regalia” was a nice, smooth, tuneful song but it sounded too much like the kind of schlock that would have slotted nicely into the type and style of music played on the Afrikaans service of the SABC at the time. It probably was never played on the Afrikaans service but that refusal would have been more of a reflection on the narrow-mindedness of the playlist compilers than on the quality of the music or the fact that it would have fitted right in there. Anyhow, this music was not the stuff of adoration as far as I was concerned. It was nice, that was all. Later on the typical Zappa sardonic lyric, underpinned by very serious music, with his truly scrumptious voice, drew me in to liking more Zappa music but never to the extent that I would have paid much money for his records or make an effort to acquire a collection of them.

 

In any event, back in the day when I bought a lot of records, the earlier Zappa albums were simply not available. The earliest widely available record I remember is Zoot Allures. Oh, and for some reason Sygma Records stocked Cruising With Reuben & The Jets (1968) and Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970) at the time when I started hanging out there, which must have been from about 1972 onwards. I knew about albums like Freak Out! and We're Only in It For The Money but never saw the records. Most of the ‘80s stuff was more or less freely available on release and in the CD age there was a great deal of reissuing of the classic albums.

 

Nowadays (well, 2010), especially in the likes of Musica, you hardly come across any Zappa product. Under Z you will find Z Z Top and Zucchero but not Frank Zappa. I guess this means that he isn’t fashionable, or not yet.

 

Just about every musical style is recycled at one time or another and I am sure that a major artist like Zappa is going to have his followers, even among young musicians, and that it is only a matter of time before a currently unknown group or individual releases a Zappa-esque tune or two which is greeted with great enthusiasm by the rock press and voted album of the year, or whatever, then Frank will find himself in public demand again, there will be the remastered re-releases, the eulogies and all of the rest of the trappings.

 

I've always wanted to own Freak Out!,  Cruising With Reuben & The Jets and even Weasels Ripped My Flesh (strictly speaking these albums are by the Mothers of Invention, but for all practical purposes it is all Frank Zappa).

 

In the case of the last two records the wish to own them is simply based on the nostalgic recollection of all those Friday afternoons I used to hang out at Sygma Records, flipping through the stacks of covers of albums I could not afford to buy even if I wanted to.

 

And that would be about it. At this point my main interest in the music of Frank Zappa is purely historical. Purely and simply I would like to know what it was all about and I cannot see myself suddenly developing an obsessed fascination with the man’s music to the extent where I start seeking out all, or most, of the 60 albums out there.

 

I wonder whether the guy who imported the video cassette of Baby Snakes now owns the DVD version and whether he ever watches it anymore? He was young and impressionable then; now he’s divorced  and works in the snows of Kazakhstan or some such distant oil rich republic that was once part of the Soviet Union. Maybe Baby Snakes is just what you need to pass the long dreary hours when you are not working. After all, it is music, it is funny (kind of) and the claymation effects are pretty amazing.

 

Postscript:

 

Since I’ve joined Apple Music, I’ve been able to investigate a great deal of music not previously available to me, some of it from contemporary, or near contemporary, acts and quite a lot of it from acts I knew of during the ‘70s and early ‘80s.  For at least half of  the ‘70s I didn’t have the money to be able to buy records and one of my pastimes was to hang out in the only record shop in Stellenbosch, studying album covers and preparing a mental bucket/wish list of records I would’ve liked to own.  Records by The Mothers of Invention or Frank Zappa weren’t on any wish list, ever.

 

With Apple Music I’ve been able to listen to many of those records I once desired but, though I’ve done some investigation into Zappa’s back catalogue, I’ve not yet made a concerted, structured effort to listen to all of his output.  I’ve downloaded the records I used to own and recently I’ve listened to Freak Out (1966) (and thought it quite ordinary albeit with japes) but I’m not convinced that I would want to listen to all of the Mothers / Zappa records sequentially.