ZAPPA THOUGHT YOU WERE AN IDIOT BUT YOU BOUGHT HIS ALBUMS ANYWAY

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Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, along with King Crimson, are my two favorite bands from the "prog rock" school of making things busy, although my appreciation of both bands stems from the fact that they are outliers from the form. Before anyone was aware of it, there seemed to be a dozen bands that sounded like Yes, ELP, and Genesis—so many of them with similar riffs, oddly regimented time signatures, and fantasy, sci-fi, or "cosmic muffin" levels of grandiose lyric-baiting. I admit the truly committed prog partisans could tell the difference, as could I in most blindfold tests, but the real issue was what exactly the point of all that repetition of effort was. The answer was clear: sales of records and tickets, no less than with the disco movement. It wasn't all mercenary, as it's unlikely anyone begins to play music of any kind without a love of making instruments produce sweet sounds, but the idea was that prog rock was selling. Despite the protests maintaining that it was a new art form, or a natural expression from musicians who'd grown up listening to the refined stuff—which it was in both cases—choosing to be in a prog band was a commercial move, not an artistic one.

Zappa and KC, though, had other things in mind: a certain kind of monomania that made the music—morphing, argumentative, diverse, and truly "out there" in both bands—more important than anything else. Weasels Ripped My Flesh is my favorite Mothers/Zappa release simply because it neatly highlights the leader's astounding range, from gritty atonal classicism, free jazz cacophony, old-school rhythm and blues, and electronic skroinksterism to a good amount of Zappa's flying-dagger guitar improvisation. It's a résumé album, you might say—a release of material that had not yet made it onto an album. Outtakes, they used to call them: music from both studio sessions and live dates sublimely edited together. Through the styles and moods this record masterfully presents—the crankiest avant-garde experimentation coexisting with humdinger fanfares, an obstacle course of rapid and bizarre meter changes, and the sustained scream of a deranged arrangement for reed instruments—you begin, perhaps, to appreciate the genius Frank Zappa was.

"Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask," "The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue," "My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama," "Oh No"—these titles provide a good idea as to the peculiar landscape that is Zappa's imagination. It is satirical, vulgar, and entirely surreal, using the commodities of consumer capitalism to poke a sharp stick into the vulnerable and obese sides of our collective American fetishism for gadgets, fads, and trends. An admirable facet of Zappa's work as a librettist is that he has no interest in creating poetic/philosophical/spiritual constructs that operate as fire exits for the consumer who wants a safe space for his psyche to believe, however fleetingly, that everything is okay and that he's doing just fine. No such luck, as Brother Zappa distorts the chaos you're already in and aware of, making it his goal to give you the shock of recognition: That is, what am I laughing at? With the disconcerting variety and collision-course eclecticism the Mothers of Invention so brilliantly maintained, it would seem to have been Zappa's goal to shame at least a few folks in his audience into recognizing the softness of their thinking, turning off the TV, and getting a library card.

ZAPPA PLAYED BY OTHERS

Frank Zappa was often brilliant in composing in his multi-decade career as an agent provocateur in America's fickle, short-memory popular culture. Most early fans, I am convinced, because they thought he was weird, off the wall, psychedelic to a high degree, a man with a band, the Mothers of Invention, creating the perfect soundtrack for whatever recreational drugs you happen to take. It may seem like a conceited thing to say at this point in my life, and it may be due to romancing the glory days of the Sixties when one was discovering literature, art, great music; I love his odd time signatures, abrupt switches between genres sans easy-going transitions, his dedication to dissonance. 

It was an audio-assault American audience weren't used to, large audiences, mass audiences in any event, but I soon suspected there was more to Zappa's game than random bizarreness as I encountered him in interviews insisting, over and over, that he didn't do drugs of any kind. He did imbibe alcohol from time to time, which was a relief since I couldn't imagine, in my still expanding mind-- because I was incapable of conceding that anyone could be as not-of-this-earth as Zappa without having to insult his brain in some manner.  Even so, he was sober as a judge, a serious composer, and the music he made from the early efforts to the end of his was the work of a man who regarded himself not as a pop star, rock star, or even professional celebrity, but rather as an artist, a composer, a severe composer making use of anything he found helpful in his goal of alternately inspiring or antagonizing his audience. There's much admiration to the dedication to complexity, although I understand why many have seen him off-putting and arrogant. 

That he was, but I still like his music and continue to listen to it since I first bought my first Zappa album, We're Only in it for the Money, in the late Sixties. That said, I have become less and less of a fan of Zappa's guitar solos, which I find, and have always found repetitive and without direction. His extended, live solos on many of his albums ruin the experience of hearing fine musicians play arresting compositions. It's a habit born of modern jazz players developed in the  40s and 50s. Through a significant portion of the 60s, when soloists of exceptional caliber would improvise ad infinitum, engaging the process of "spontaneous composition," an idea that a musician, responding to impulse, urge, inspiration and certainly without a great deal of preparation, careens off the highway and ventures down several tonal tributaries in a hunt for a better combination of notes in increasingly tricky formations. Some geniuses managed this consistently in their work, with John Coltrane coming to mind most easily; his music, with his friends Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison, among a handful of others, being all of a piece. The inventiveness of the extended forays went far beyond a riffing variations-on-a-theme and became whole compositional endeavors.  Keith Jarrett also should be mentioned, although that for all the brilliance he demonstrates as band leader and band member, his several multi-disc solo piano concerts have merely bored me; so much effort getting himself warmed up for the inspired parts makes you think more of someone burning gasoline looking for the perfect parking space rather than an artist working their way efficiently to the dimension where they exceed their expectations. For Zappa, he is neither of these two musicians to whatever degree. He is an exciting guitarist, recognizable from the first note, influential in relatively short solos tailored to the material (One Size Fits All). He is not the world-class concert soloist, although his True Believers wish it were the case. I hope he'd written sections for his best improvisers and let them shine, a lesson he might have learned from the Great Ellington. Lately, I've been dialing up interpretations of his daunting pieces, with generally good, even spectacular results. 

Here's a unit doing a tight and together take on the dizzying and sonically cubist "G Spot Tornado," originally from his  1986 release Jazz from Hell. This was a disc of wholly instrumental tunes with uncompromised complexity and density. The majority of the tracks were the efforts of Zappa's programming of a then-bleeding edge synthesizer, the Synclavier, without the aid of other musicians for most of the album. The band here, Germany's hr-Bigband out of Frankfurt, serves a blistering version in this clip.

ZAPPA

I saw the documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in his Own Words the day before yesterday and I thought it was a  generally good representation of Zappa the social critic and Zappa the serious musician. The interview segments, which are abundant, span his career, as does the generous inclusion of live performances with The Mothers of Invention. He was extremely intelligent, actually iconoclastic and gifted as a composer, but like many others with vast talents that prefer no constraint and mouths that prefer no editing, you get the feeling he indulged his worst habits as often as he did his best talents. There is a repetition of ideas in his asides, rants, and excoriations, a set of notions that he honed and delivered continuously over the years, libertarian-genius bromides that wear you down toward the end of the film. Still, despite the repetition, you do marvel at the way in which he cuts away the fat and gets to the crude, stupid heart that is the pulse of consumerist culture.  But as a fan of Zappa's music, I was very happy, as the film includes generous portions from live performances that make us realize that above all else, Zappa was an artist, a genius of some sort.  Even die-hard fans and scholars of his work have complained that Zappa didn’t challenge himself nearly enough and often times released albums that were sub-par, highlighting musical ideas from bygone decades that no longer seemed fresh, riveting, or daring. His satire, in turn, gave way to stark cynicism where disdain, undistilled or leavened with much in the way of wit, ceased being funny or witty in large measure and was, for a good number of records released through the Seventies and even though much of the Eighties, merely mean-spirited. The manner he chose to make audiences to laugh, if they did at all, was to position himself as the narrator who knows that the world is composed of willful idiots and that the audience buying his records and concert tickets are among the cognoscenti who are likewise aware the world of man is doomed to collapse under centuries of hubris and bad faith. Even the most critical amongst his fans would have to admit that listening to his verbal riffing found them nodding more in agreement and laughing less and less the more scorn he poured onto the world. His cynicism had conquered his inspiration, likely because he realized that he could make money by being this cartoon character “Frank Zappa”, becoming the man his fans wanted him to be. It was about making money in order to finance his larger orchestral projects and the irony that he needed to compromise his principles and act the way new fans with disposable income expected to behave was likely not lost on him.

Orson Wells had a similar situation, the story goes, as he took a good many demeaning roles in whatever variety of Hollywood schlock came his way so he could finance his own projects. It's an odd curse, I suppose, a problem the working world would have considered a bother at all. How would one have challenged Zappa, though? His comfort zone was a strange amalgamation of influences --Lenny Bruce, Stravinsky, Sun Ra, Edgar Varese, Lord Buckley, Musique Concrete-- that it's probable that few would know what to suggest as a way for him to diverge from his rut. He created his niche, proud that he wasn't dependent on grant money, gifts from government agencies and the like. He was something like a homeschooler, nearly irrational in his belief that government couldn't do anything good for the population. There are times when I have to filter the rants I agree with in principle-and turn up the on this music, a body of work that's confused, amused, confounded, entertained and thrilled me to the marrow since I came across in the 60s.Zappa's work as a serious composer already has a fairly full catalog; one could, I suspect, produce a week or two of special concerts featuring Zappa's "serious " work. But I agree that there was much in the seventies I disliked from the man in the 70s. "One Size Fits All" was actually a solid album, firing on all cylinders, but commencing with "Apostrophe", featuring the egregious "Yellow Snow" and onward, his satire degenerated into a species of juvenile smut. What would have been interesting would have been if he had collaborated with artists of similar stature, on smaller projects, in different musical areas. Not the Elvis Costello grandstanding collaborations, but rather real efforts to work toward the best virtues of another artist. That would have been something had he wanted to make the effort, but his personality was controlling, ironically, despite his diatribes about freedom. There was something of Howard Roark in him that his work would be presented to the world on his terms solely, uncontaminated by meddlers, sycophants and their like. The downside of Zappa's libertarian attitude about his music--my art, my way, at the price I said, or nothing at all--is that much of his output is a remarkably eccentric selection of self-invented cliches. As much as he deserves to be praised for resourcefulness and achieving a crazy amalgam of jazz, classical, comedy and rock, there are go-to moves he never strayed from, bits of business that seemed more treading water than an expansion of established themes. I do wish he'd found time and interest in collaborating with other musicians on equal footing--singers, lyricists, musicians, other composers.. The results might have been interesting and gotten the late FZ out of his comfort zone and lightened the lid on that vacuum packed cynicism that ceased to be amusing long before he passed on.