Lets talk Frank Zappa
alieNDN
2,181 Posts
sorry, I really got no objective here, but i wanted to see an in depth Frank Zappa discussion thread on the Soul Struthers. I dont know, talk about best tracks, albums or anything else. I remember i found out about him not through music but i heard that he recorded a double album of lawn mower noise to get out of a contract. Then I heard his "Strictly Commercial" compilation sheit and was on the floor cause i thought "jesus christ, this is his Commercial sheit?!" I didn't like the stuff at all when i first heard it, thought it was too wierd, but learned to hook onto it later...and not with that "listen to this album when you're high" bullsheit either.
Read his autobiography and thought, godamn, even if this dude didnt make music, he's one of the most fascinating people i've ever read up on. Watched him do some cross fire debate where he emphasized his point eloquently defending all kinds of sheit, so quick witted like, defending himself in court without skipping a beat. Read about him in guitar magazines about how much he hated making "rock music" and only did it to fund his orchestraic pursuits. Listened to his more popular albums and its like...damn, isn't he sort of like a LIVE DJ? he combines all these different forms of music and time signatures/tempos that have no business being together and makes them coherent. Take his sheit seriously and does not phuck with drummers. Watching the DVD babysnakes was a treat. Too bad of his early death, i understand he was just getting into computers and he was pumped about it (primarily because it cut him too much on funds to hire people to perform his sheet music. I'd like to see what he'd do today with a tool like Reason)
Please contribute on. What pleases me in this lifetime is if I buy just one frank zappa album a year for the rest of my life and die at a healthy age, i still may not be able to truthfully claim
crazy output.
ramble on.
Read his autobiography and thought, godamn, even if this dude didnt make music, he's one of the most fascinating people i've ever read up on. Watched him do some cross fire debate where he emphasized his point eloquently defending all kinds of sheit, so quick witted like, defending himself in court without skipping a beat. Read about him in guitar magazines about how much he hated making "rock music" and only did it to fund his orchestraic pursuits. Listened to his more popular albums and its like...damn, isn't he sort of like a LIVE DJ? he combines all these different forms of music and time signatures/tempos that have no business being together and makes them coherent. Take his sheit seriously and does not phuck with drummers. Watching the DVD babysnakes was a treat. Too bad of his early death, i understand he was just getting into computers and he was pumped about it (primarily because it cut him too much on funds to hire people to perform his sheet music. I'd like to see what he'd do today with a tool like Reason)
Please contribute on. What pleases me in this lifetime is if I buy just one frank zappa album a year for the rest of my life and die at a healthy age, i still may not be able to truthfully claim
crazy output.
ramble on.
Comments
1
T.N.
although this isnt really and album, for me this is my first Zappa album. its like a crazy autobiography, the funniest is a skit..well its not a skit, but a hidden recorder where security dude comes to bust zappa and crew for being too loud in their hotel room. the security guard goes into this crazy intense rant about he's breaking his back to let them stay there while zappa keeps cutting him off going "would you like a bun? here have a bun"
some really good outakes on that
he only has one break outta 100 albums???
:wherestheweaksaucegreamlin?:
I like all of the eras he's been in. The early Mothers stuff is just great, the Flo & Eddie era is its own entity, and then you have his jazzier Ruth Underwood/George Duke-era, which lead to all the different eras afterwards, when people like Terry Bozzio, Adrian Belew, and of course Steve Vai made their way in.
I will say this, if people get into Zappa's music merely to find any lost breaks, they are going to miss some incredible, inspiring work from someone who was easily one of the most creative musicians of the rock era.
As far as computers are concerned, he was one of the first rock musicians to buy not only the first Synclaviers and Fairlights, but also one of the first to take digital recording seriously, when digital recording was reserved for classical artists. Up to his death, he was very aware of the technology that existed, and a lot of his concepts that he seeked was limited only by the capabilities of his equipment. That's why he had his people put things together in the studio, so that it would work. At a time when surround sound was limited to movies (and dated in music), he was fooling around with 6-channel surround sound and had said in interviews that it could be applied to modern music. Tech-savvy he was.
He said he loved what a live band provided, but found the modern convenience of computer recording very challenging, as you can hear on Jazz From Hell, an album which as a lot of us Pacific Northwest residents know, was an album that Fred Meyer placed their own explicit advisory on even though it's an instrumental album. I'm sure Matt Groening, who bought his first Zappa album at a Fred Meyer, laughed at that.
He eventually lost the ability to play guitar in the late 80's, but fortunately that didn't stop him from doing what he could to preserve his work. I've seen photos of his vault, complete with master tapes of everything he's ever recorded, both in studio and live, as well as every piece of video and film footage he could gain access to.
Big influence on me.
He has a few, but I won't mention them.......
funnily enuff, first zappa i got too... got it on 45 for a quarter when i was 16 and was psyched that it sounded kinda like Funkadelic...
in general, not really a fan, but "freak out" is am amazing record... considering it was released in 1966, it's a fucked up record...
I just read here that Frank Zappa asked artist Neon Park to do something with the following cover.
I used to play all of his records but now I stick to Uncle Meat, Weazels ripped my flesh, Burnt weeny sandwich and Freak out. I like his little musical doodles most. It's like psychedelic chamber music to me, or it can be all cartoony.
What I didn't understand was why he remixed his old records for CD release. Especially Spider Of Destiny and Regyptian Strut, which I like very much. Chad Wackerman did new drum parts on those and I don't understand the thinking behind that.
Eh, no hate here... I respect the fact Zappa just kept busy with all his old stuff and Chad Wackerman's Forty Reasons is a fusion bomb.
grerat live version on that filmore lp
That's the "Roxy & Elsewhere" double album. Got that too. Very nice live-set from Zappa. But right now it's all about
I'm listening to "Sharleena" while painting my kitchen. Those whiny Flo & Eddie vocals at the beginning are the shit. It just dawned on me that Gotan Project sampled the bassline from the title track, which is the shit as well. Sugarcane Harris on organ (!) and nice Ian Underwood wahwah sax solo.
Also listening quite a bit to
I used to have a lot of Zappa recs, but I was always buying them for my friend Simon who was a Zappa nut, so I sold them to him straight away: Freak Out, Fillmore live and others. I wish I kept more of them. Frank Z was a very original dude, no doubt.
Zappa is just so DIFFERENT it??s difficult to get it at times. He didn??t do drugs (as a matter of fact he was almost thrown out of the earliest incarnation of the Mothers of Invention because he didn??t do drugs along with the rest of the band!) and forged these ridiculously weird soundscapes without the aid of anything but black coffee and cigarettes! He was also a great business man, but I think he got real bitter on his later days over all the struggles he fought with different record companies and the band of idiots that ran them.
All he wanted was to present his music to a wide audience without having the companies twist it to have "greater appeal" to a larger mass of increasingly stupid people. This is commented on brilliantly through all the bits of his music and writings that deal with Suzi Creamcheese, the fictional, ideal, teen-age music buyer that the companies struggle to please.
Mos def one of the artists that has had the largest influence upon me as a person and as an artist.
- J
Do you think that was totally sincere, or might it have been a (bussiness) strategy to, say, appear the most "hermetic" (
Also, did he ever cover anything in a non-ironic way? I only remember Strawberry fields forever at his Broadway the hard way concert.
Cosign. On all of this. Plus, remember when he did a cameo appearance on one of the last episodes of The Monkees? He was dressed up as Michael Nesmith, Nesmith was disguised as Zappa, and both men proceeded to lampoon each other's public images. Brilliant.
Zappa is a guy I've always admired, for the reasons stated in the box up there,and also because he defended the Monkees and the Turtles when most "hip" listeners derided these bands as flaky pop music.
What stops me from going whole hog Zappa?
THIS:
...and even when he was doing the artsy-fartsy jazz/classical shit, it seemed like he thought he was too "good" or something for his audience. It showed in his music. His first album with the Mothers of Invention (Freak Out!) is a wall-to-wall classic, but over the years he progressively got full of himself. Too much fusiony guitar wank, IMO.
As far as this kind of thing goes, I prefer Captain Beefheart. For me, his music holds up better than Zappa's in the long run; it's not as pompous. Even Zappa's doo-wop album (Cruising With Ruben & The Jets) sounds a little too "ironic" (even though he played in East L.A. R&B bands as a teenager). But Beefheart is alright with me.
My intro to Zappa was as a 11-12 year old listening to The Dr. Demento Show; loved him then, but the appeal wore off the older I got. These days, about the only Zappa I can listen to is the Verve stuff, and even then, Freak Out! is way superior to the rest of his albums on that label. In my opinion.
But for all my reservations about the man's music, I still mourned his passing. He had integrity you can't front on.
Nah, I think it was the other way around - since the Mothers was HIS band, HE was the one throwing people out BECAUSE they did drugs!
It's got "Muffin Man" "Advance Romance" and "So this is a Drive-in Restaurant in Hollywood (title?)." Beefheart and George Duke are on it as well.
I ushered a midnight Frank Zappa show at the Fox Theater in Atlanta on the Joe's Garage Tour. Found a nice joint case with four fatties inside that someone from the early show had lost. Smoked them. Great show.
I always thought these looked alike.
Dennis Coffey maybe? Just a personal favorite.
I've listened to and liked much of his music, but...
I have a hard time with artists who hate thier audience. He always made it clear that he felt he was far above his audience, his contemporarys and even his own music. He aspired to be Stockhousen, but I think he fell short of that goal.
As for the Ellington story, Duke was never broke. In the 50s, 60s and 70s he kept the big band together by underwriting the cost of a big band with royalty money.
I saw Zappa about '73 with a big band. I remember the Fowler brothers were in it. I'm sure Ruth Underwood was not. I can't remember if their was a violin. I don't remember the rhythm section at all. I think the last song was America Drinks And Goes Home. The kind of fun that is evident on Roxy and Eleswhere, and Filmore East was not evident that night.
Dan