A Relatively Brief Guide to Frank Zappa's Sprawling Discography
THE EARLY MOTHERS OF INVENTION ERA
Frank Zappa began his recording career producing soundtracks for obscure independent movies and novelty singles. But he began really making a name for himself after taking over leadership of pre-existing bar band The Soul Giants, rechristening them as The Mothers of Invention, and turning them into a vehicle for his original songs.
The Mothers’ debut album FREAK OUT! (1966) is a mission statement introducing Zappa’s satirical outlook. The group are defined in opposition to consumerism and conformity (“Hungry Freaks, Daddy”), to the traditional pop music love song (“Ain’t Got No Heart”), and even to rock’s (then) teenage target audience (“You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here”). The pop songs on the first half of the album have a great sneering attitude that makes them a forerunner to the punk music that emerged a decade later, though the catchy melodies also display Zappa’s fine craftsmanship. The latter portion of the album is less focused, featuring an atypically sincere (and very obviously Bob Dylan-inspired) anti-racist protest song (“Trouble Every Day”) and a pair of abrasive noise pieces (“Help, I’m a Rock” and “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet”) that are rather basic and of their era compared to Zappa’s later work in a similar vein.
ABSOLUTELY FREE (1967) is a huge leap forward in compositional ambition. The Mothers add a woodwind player, keyboardist, and a second drummer to dramatically expand their musical palette, plus some creative editing to allow for more complex arrangements than the musicians could pull off live. The spastic and unpredictable shifts in tone, tempo, and genre, combined with the wild mix of vocal performances from nearly everyone in the group, make it feel like the music is constantly on the verge of collapsing into pure chaos, which perfectly complements the lyrics’ depiction of the United States being overrun by perversely greedy consumers and the politicians who exploit them. The penultimate track, absurdly dense rock opera “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” takes the patchwork aesthetic to its logical extreme as it bluntly transitions from blues to vaudeville to free jazz to abstract classical, all held together with a weird internal compositional logic.
WE’RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY (1968) directs equal scorn at trend-hopping hippie teens and their confused conservative parents. The cover art is a parody of The Beatles’ iconic SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND collage, but apart from a closing track that is an abstract riff on the portentous climactic piano sustain from “A Day in the Life” the songs are mostly parodying Californian folk rock rather than British psychedelia. This means that the songs are relatively simplistic by Zappa’s usual standards, but he is at his most satirically and conceptually focused. The direct addresses to the listener (“all your children are poor unfortunate victims of lies you believe”) still cut deep today, and the musique concrete disruptions that make it sound like the record is skipping have a creepy edge even when removed from their original vinyl context. None of the individual songs rank among my favorites, but as an overall statement this is Zappa at his most cohesive and purposeful.
An early version of LUMPY GRAVY (1968) was actually released in limited quantities (and only on 8-track) prior to WE’RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY but was pulled due to a strange contractual dispute. An executive at Capitol Records commissioned Zappa to make a classical solo album using a 40-piece makeshift orchestra of session musicians, but MGM disputed the composer’s right to release non-Mothers music elsewhere. Zappa re-edited the original album extensively into a sonic collage that mashed up the orchestral recordings with excerpts from his pre-Mothers music, newly recorded semi-improvised dialogue from some eccentrics who were in his orbit at the time, and random electronic noise. This was all molded into two side-long tracks that play like somebody flipping a radio dial between the world’s most esoteric stations. It’s basically long-from musique concrete, but too colorful, fun and wild to qualify as a difficult listen.
CRUISING WITH RUBEN & THE JETS (1968) drastically changes the tone from Zappa’s previous projects and serves as a semi-ironic but mostly loving tribute to the doo wop music of his youth. There is some level of parody here, from the intentionally insipid lyrics to some little musical pranks being thrown into the arrangements (such as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” being interpolated in the closing vocal harmonies of “Fountain of Love”). But Zappa and his band clearly have a genuine affection for this style of old-fashioned R&B and go to great pains to make these recordings sound like the music that they loved as teenagers. A minor work overall, but too lovingly constructed (and too full of excellent vocal performances) to qualify as a mere gimmicky side project.1
UNCLE MEAT (1969) was recorded simultaneously with the previous album but could hardly sound more distinct. With the help of a battery of overdubs and all manner of pitch-shifting effects The Mothers of Invention transform into an electric chamber orchestra, who occasionally shift into aggressive free jazz to spice things up. There is a heavier emphasis on woodwinds, harpsichord, and orchestral percussion than on guitar and bass, and many of the instruments have been processed to produce weird cartoonish timbres that gives the album a one-of-a-kind sound. The music isn’t merely weird though, as several of the melodies that recur in various forms (“Uncle Meat,” “Dog Breath,” “Pound for a Brown,” and “King Kong”) are among Zappa’s most infectiously pretty. Superb mad scientist music.
Solo release HOT RATS (1969) leaves behind the jarring musique concrete edits and blunt satire of the early Mothers albums and replaces them with smooth, forceful jazz fusion playing. It’s all vividly captured on then-state of the art 16-track recordings that allow Ian Underwood (the one member of the core Mothers of Invention group who appears) to overdub a huge number of piano, organ, flute, clarinet, and saxophone parts on most of the songs. Underwood and Zappa are joined by a rotating group of ace session musicians and various notable guest stars (including Shuggie Otis, Captain Beefheart, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Don “Sugarcane” Harris) who alternate swiftly between intricately arranged compositions and extended jams. The project has gained a reputation as the Zappa album for people who don’t like Zappa, but it is one of those rare cases where an artist manages to push his sound in an accessible direction without watering down what makes his work special.
Zappa abruptly dissolved the original Mothers of Invention right around the time of HOT RATS’ release but had a huge backlog of unreleased studio and live recordings from their time together. He planned a 12-record box set called THE HISTORY & IMPROVISATIONS OF THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION, but record companies were (perhaps understandably) reluctant to release something so unwieldy and the project never came to fruition.
However, two single LP albums originally intended as samplers of the box set’s contents were released. BURNT WEENY SANDWICH (1970) mostly consists of instrumentals with the ’68-’69 Mothers playing in their unique “garage band as chamber orchestra” style, though there is more of a rough live-to-tape sound here than on the post-production heavy UNCLE MEAT. The highpoint is “Little House I Used to Live In,” a monstrous collage of scraps of various studio and live recordings climaxing in an incredible scorched earth electric violin solo from “Sugarcane” Harris. WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH (1970) continuously segues between The Mothers at their most abrasive and their most tuneful. The avant-garde improvisations aren’t Zappa’s best, but there are a lot of gems among the structured songs, including classics “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” (a fun novelty song that should have been a hit) and “Oh No” (a rebuke of The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” set to a gorgeous melody previously used on LUMPY GRAVY).
THE FLO & EDDIE ERA
Zappa’s path forward following the breakup of the original Mothers of Invention was not clear, and he didn’t figure out where he was going in time for CHUNGA’S REVENGE (1970) to feel like anything more than a grab bag transitional album. There’s an outtake from HOT RATS, a few recordings from a jazz fusion band that never got off the ground, a live excerpt from that group that Zappa toured with for most of 1970 jamming on “King Kong,” and several pop songs featuring vocal duo Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. Volman and Kaylan had recently left The Turtles and went under the aliases “Flo & Eddie” to get around record company contract issues. Zappa hadn’t really figured out what to do with Flo & Eddie at this point, although the soul ballad “Sharleena” is one of his best (failed) attempts at writing a hit single. The ominous prog instrumental title track is another highlight, featuring a fantastically weird solo from a saxophone fed through a wah-wah pedal.
Flo & Eddie were, for better and mostly worse, much more fully integrated into FILLMORE EAST JUNE 1971 (1971). The sound is far slicker and more simplistic than what the original Mothers of Invention trafficked in, with an emphasis on comedy rather than music. The project consists of mostly new material and is creatively structured as a sort of narrative about Flo & Eddie’s backstage experiences in the world of rock & roll, which does at least make it more ambitious than the average live album. Unfortunately, the humor is more obnoxious than funny and has limited replay value.
200 MOTELS (1971), an enormous project consisting of a surreal midnight movie and a double soundtrack album, is the messy magnum opus of this version of The Mothers. The album alternates, somewhat clunkily, between classical pieces performed by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and relatively straightforward rock songs about life on the road performed by Zappa’s band, with a bridge between genres sometimes formed by Flo & Eddie singing over the orchestral performances. In the classical material, the distinctive character of Zappa’s music is drowned out by the huge number of musicians working with limited rehearsal time.2 The rock songs are a lot catchier than those on the FILLMORE EAST album, though the proto-BEHIND THE MUSIC subject matter seems less fascinating today than it might have been in 1971.
This version of The Mothers broke up in late 1971 after a crazy fan rushed the stage and threw Zappa into an orchestra pit, leaving him wheelchair bound for the first few months of 1972. A morbidly fitting end for a group that spent so much time bluntly detailing the hassles of touring in rock band.
Zappa released one more live document of this group called JUST ANOTHER BAND FROM L.A. (1972). It’s a lot more fun than FILLMORE EAST, mostly due to awesome side-long opener “Billy the Mountain.” Though ostensibly conceived as a parody of contemporaneous rock operas, the song has more in common with old-fashioned radio plays. The details of the absurd narrative (about a draft-dodging mountain who is trying to enjoy a vacation after receiving royalty checks for the postcards he’s appeared on) were altered by Flo & Eddie and Zappa each night to incorporate local references, and the version on this album is hilariously silly. The second side of the album, consisting of two forgettable original songs and a pair of remakes of fan favorites from the original Mothers, is unremarkable.
BIG BAND WORK
WAKA/JAWAKA (1972) marks a drastic and welcome change in direction, trading in the overbearing comedy and simplistic rock of the Flo & Eddie era for a highly sophisticated blend of jazz, rock and classical. The album contains just four songs, but three of them are among the best things Zappa ever released. “Big Swifty” sounds like Zappa’s take on BITCHES BREW-era Miles Davis, with an uncharacteristic emphasis on collective improvisation rather than clearly defined solos. Tony Duran’s prominent slide guitar adds a twangy country element that carries over into the two shorter songs in this middle of the album, including the unclassifiable “It Just Might Be a One-Shot Deal,” an indescribable piece of music that doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve heard, Zappa or otherwise. The title track, my all-time favorite song by anyone, basically sounds like a “Bolero”-style classical composition executed by a fusion band. It boasts a gorgeous woodwind arrangement, a liquid Minimoog solo by Don Preston, impressively dexterous drumming by Aynsley Dunbar, and powerful climactic use of orchestral chimes. The album is massively overlooked, even by fans, and is a highlight of Zappa’s discography.
THE GRAND WAZOO (1972) expands the musical palette even further, with some of the tracks boasting up to 19 musicians. The sound is more bombastic than on the previous album, at times sounding like Zappa’s warped take on marching band or royal processional music. Once again, this is all killer no filler, with the second half in particular featuring some of Zappa’s best-ever work. “Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus” makes hilarious use of wordless vocals imitating horn and opera singer notes. “Eat That Question” is a tremendously funky showcase for George Duke’s Fender Rhodes and also features a scorching guitar solo from Zappa and a banging outro section with dramatic brass and stomping percussion. The uncharacteristically serene “Blessed Relief” features gorgeously tender interplay between brass, woodwinds, and guitar.
It wasn’t economically feasible for Zappa to continue in this big band direction for more than a year, but in that short space of time he produced some of his most remarkable work.3
THE DUKE & UNDERWOOD BANDS
OVER-NITE SENSATION (1973) introduced a fan-favorite era of Zappa’s music that crammed the virtuoso musicianship, complex arrangements, and warm tone of the Big Band albums into a package as slickly commercial as the Flo & Eddie albums. The balance of precision and spontaneity makes this era, and this and the next album in particular, the easiest entry point for listeners unfamiliar with Zappa’s music. It helps that he wrote some of his catchiest tunes around this time, with songs like “Camarillo Brillo,” “Dinah-Moe Humm,” and “Montana” each becoming long-running fixtures of live sets. Those familiar songs all sound their best with this album’s crisp production and deluxe arrangements, including valuable vocal assistance from Tina Turner & The Ikettes and Hanna Barbera voice actor Ricky Lancelotti.
APOSTROPHE (‘) (1974) was largely recorded during the same sessions as OVER-NITE SENSATION and continues the good vibes. At 9 tracks and 32 minutes it is Zappa’s tightest and most accessible sets of songs and wound up being his only album to land in the Billboard Top 10. Everything sounds pristine and there’s not a second of filler, with even the semi-improvised jam of a title track being laser focused, although Zappa still makes room for interesting deep cuts like the uncharacteristic gospel/soul song “Uncle Reamus.” The bulk of the album is made up of concert staples like the “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” suite, “Cosmik Debris,” and “Stink-Foot,” each of which are presented in their finest form.
Live double-album ROXY & ELSEWHERE (1974) continues the tight playing and fun-loving spirit of the previous two studio albums but leaves more room for Zappa’s fantastic band to show off. Marimba/vibraphone/timpani player Ruth Underwood and keyboardist George Duke are the stars of the rotating group of musicians that Zappa employed around this time, and each get extended showcases on these recordings. The band combines the grit of rock with the expansiveness of jazz and the precision of classical and pulls it off in a way that seems spontaneous and joyful. The friendly tone even extends to the very funny intro speeches that Zappa gives on all four sides. He rarely sounded this likeable and approachable. There are a few moments (the comedy bit “Dummy Up” and the audience participation dance contest in the middle of “Be-Bop Tango”) that seem like you had to be there, but even during those times the fun that the band is having is palpable and infectious.
Many fans consider ONE SIZE FITS ALL (1975) to be Zappa’s masterpiece. I find it less consistent in terms of quality of style than the previous three albums, but it arguably peaks higher with the fluidly gorgeous “Inca Roads,” the majestic “Sofa,” and the rhythmically outrageous “Andy.” The aesthetic for most of the album is knotty prog rock with lots of room for spacey fusion solos, with Duke particularly standing out with his battery of keyboards and synths. Even the throwaway tracks (recession-themed blues rocker “Can’t Afford No Shoes” and glorified jam “Po-Jama People”) have a certain charm to them thanks to the exceptional playing of the musicians and the crystal-clear recording and mix.
ARENA ROCK ERA
Though billed as a collaboration between Zappa and on-again/off-again childhood friend Captain Beefheart, BONGO FURY (1975) feels more like “Frank Zappa with occasional interjections from Captain Beefheart.” The psychedelic bluesman contributes two great songs (“Sam with the Showing Scalp Flat Top” and “Man with the Woman Head”), and the one Zappa-written track that feels like a genuine attempt to merge his and Beefheart’s aesthetics (“Debra Kadabra”) is also a highlight, which makes it a shame that Beefheart barely appears (if at all) on several other pieces. Setting aside the disappointing lack of true collaboration, this is an interesting transitional album for Zappa. Half Zappa’s band here consists of jazz fusion players from the previous group and the rest are some of the musicians who would help him move towards a heavier rock sound in the latter half of the ‘70s, making for a sometimes awkward but often compellingly messy sound. At times they sound like a deranged Allman Brothers Band. Zappa’s scorching album-closing guitar solo on “Muffin Man” foreshadows the increased emphasis on extended guitar heroics in his music from this point forward.
ZOOT ALLURES (1976) features an uncharacteristically minimalist sound, perhaps due to much of Zappa’s money being tied up in lawsuits involving former manager Herb Cohen. Drummer Terry Bozzio and Zappa (overdubbing himself on vocals, guitar, bass, and keyboards) are the only musicians on many of the tracks.4 The spare style is interesting as a change of pace, but it does make the recordings feel drab compared to the rest of Zappa’s ‘70s output. As with OVER-NITE SENSATION and APOSTROPHE (‘), many of ZOOT ALLURES’ songs became staples of live sets, but in this case those live versions are almost uniformly preferable to the studio recordings. The clear highlights are “Black Napkins” and the title track, both of which show off Zappa’s evolving mastery of guitar soloing.
LÄTHER (finished 1977, but technically unreleased ‘til 1996) is my all-time favorite album. Zappa planned to release it as a four-record set, but Warner Brothers refused the expensive proposal. Instead, much of the material was spread across four separate albums: the double-disc ZAPPA IN NEW YORK (1978), live recordings of Zappa’s Fall ’76 band augmented with a five-piece horn section and monologues from SNL’s Don Pardo; STUDIO TAN (1978), featuring glossy studio recordings in the vein of ONE SIZE FITS ALL; SLEEP DIRT (1979), studio recordings of jazz-rock instrumentals; and ORCHESTRAL FAVORITES (1979), live recordings of a 40-piece makeshift orchestra. There are some tracks on LÄTHER that don’t appear on any of those four albums, and others from those albums that don’t appear on LÄTHER, and many of the songs that appear on both do so in different edits or takes, so hardcore fans can’t simply choose one option or the other. But I prefer the awe-inspiring scope and variety of LÄTHER to the separate albums and always think of the 2-1/2 hour monstrosity as the “correct” format for listening to these recordings.
The sprawling project features Zappa at his most accessible (catchy pop song “For the Young Sophisticate”) and most avant-garde (ultra-dense classical composition “Pedro’s Dowry”), his most obscene (“The Legend of the Illinois Enema Bandit”) and most whimsical (“Lemme Take You to the Beach”). There’s solo-heavy jazz fusion (“The Purple Lagoon”), tightly composed orchestral pieces (“Naval Aviation in Art?”), arena rock (“Tryin’ to Grow a Chin”), and even a bunch of rapid-fire LUMPY GRAVY-esque bits of musique concrete linking many of the tracks. There’s a very elaborate 11-minute rock opera (“Punky’s Whips”) inspired by a real-life incident of Zappa walking in on Bozzio masturbating. There are wild mixes of timbres as Zappa freely combines different genre elements and recording methods, as when he overdubs a soaring electric guitar solo over a mostly acoustic jam (“The Ocean is the Ultimate Solution”). The album reaches its logical conclusion with the incredibly ambitious epic “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary,” a lively audio cartoon that incorporates every bit of compositional knowledge and studio trickery that Zappa had amassed. I can’t think of many artists who attempted as many different things in their entire discographies as Zappa does on this one album, and certainly not any who did it all at such a consistently high level.
SHEIK YERBOUTI (1979) is Zappa’s warped version of a bloated arena rock double album. The tone is set immediately with “I Have Been in You,” a parody of the title of Peter Frampton’s contemporaneous “I’m in You,” with Zappa’s version spelling out in comically graphic detail the sweaty sexuality that is merely implied in regular pop songs. The lyrics throughout the rest of the album continue to shine a black light on the obscenities that mainstream artists typically only hint at while the band does a frenzied parody of the metal, punk and disco that was popular at the time. This explosion of the id leads to some-less-than-woke lyrics, but the smuttiness mostly works in this context as a satire of the juvenile preoccupations of pop music. It helps too that Zappa’s ace Fall ’77-Winter ’78 band that plays here is his most ferocious ever, and the last of his touring lineups with a repertoire tailored specifically to their skills and personalities.
Faceless virtuosity takes over with the new band featured on JOE’S GARAGE (1979), a popular project that has never been a favorite of mine. Warren Cuccurullo’s lightning-fast yet superhumanly cleanly picked rhythm guitar and Vinnie Colaiuta’s remarkably dexterous drumming do stand out, and vocalist Ike Willis is a charismatic new personality, but there is an overall sense that Zappa is now hiring players he can bend to his will rather than ones whose personalities are informing the material. This is also Zappa’s first project recorded at his home studio, and the freedom leads to a lot of filler spread around the three-record runtime as well as a lack of focus in the tacked-on storyline (thought up halfway through the sessions) about a guy whose garage band dreams are sidelined by women, religion, critics, and a government hostile to artistic expression. The narration by The Central Scrutinizer (Zappa whispering into a megaphone) has limited replay value but is also annoyingly impossible to skip over since a lot of the songs fade in or out as he speaks. The story is mostly derailed by sophomoric sex jokes that feel out of place and play far cringier than on SHEIK YERBOUTI.
The lyrical focus on immature sex jokes, which increasingly feel more like straight-up misogyny than satire, continues on TINSEL TOWN REBELLION (1981). The recordings are primarily culled from live performances of the 1979 and Fall 1980 bands (plus the awkwardly tacked-on studio recording “Fine Girl,” performed by the Spring 1980 band). There’s a few nice musical moments, like Denny Walley’s nasty slide guitar solo on “Bamboozled by Love” and the bizarre new synth-heavy arrangement of “Peaches en Regalia,” but overall, the album feels inessential and at times unpleasant.
SHUT UP ‘N PLAY YER GUITAR (1981) is a triple-album composed almost entirely of guitar solos. That concept might sound tedious on paper, but the set has a surprising amount of variety and is thoughtfully sequenced so that it can be enjoyed by people who aren’t already massive Zappa fans and/or “Guitar World” magazine subscribers. In addition to the live improvised guitar solos (mostly extracted from the 1979 and Fall ’80 tours) there are a few previously unreleased written pieces, a pair of pseudo-acoustic studio cuts, an experiment with a new studio-recorded vamp supporting a live guitar solo, and even a duet between Jean-Luc Ponty on violin and Zappa on a bouzouki (a Greek lute-style instrument). The guitar playing is beautiful, playful, and experimental throughout, but the album is also a fantastic showcase for Colaiuta, who plays rapid polyrhythmic fills all over the place without ever losing the beat or distracting from Zappa’s improvisations.
THE 1980s
YOU ARE WHAT YOU IS (1981) is the first Zappa album that feels fully like a product of the ‘80s. The production has a sort of hair metal quality that I don’t like, and many of Tommy Mars’ keyboard effects are chintzy in a way that doesn’t sound great even when they are clearly intentionally parodying contemporary rock trends. Fortunately, the album, which consists of 20 brief pop songs, switches genres, vocalists, and satirical topics frequently enough to keep things fresh. The way that the songs segue into and sometimes reference back to each other to create continuous side-long suites of music also makes the album seem more coherent and consistent than it actually is, with the weaker material sounding worthwhile simply by virtue of being part of a big medley.
SHIP ARRIVING TOO LATE TO SAVE A DROWNING WITCH (1982) distinguishes itself from a lot of Zappa’s other ‘80s releases by being very tightly paced (6 tracks, 35 minutes, no filler) and by being totally free of the aspects of this era that I don’t like (faux reggae, electronic drums, hair metal production). It also has the best-recorded and/or mixed bass parts on any Zappa album, including Scott Thunes’ great chunky rhythm on “Valley Girl,” Zappa’s lone Top 40 hit. None of the individual songs rank among my personal favorites, but they are energetically performed, smartly sequenced, and recorded in crystal-clear quality, making this one of Zappa’s most accessible late-period albums.
THE MAN FROM UTOPIA (1983) is wildly inconsistent. The material is basically broken down into three styles – dreary pop music (including Zappa’s worst song “Stick Together,” a white guy reggae protest song about the coercive power of unions), excellent instrumentals, and some really bonkers “meltdown” songs where Zappa monologues in an exaggerated dumb guy voice while the band does some semi-improvised noodling behind him.5 As an overall project it’s not very cohesive, but it is a wild ride showing off the range of styles (and varying levels of quality) that Zappa was producing at this time.
Zappa used the money from the surprise success of “Valley Girl” to fund a collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra simply titled LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (originally released in two volumes in 1983 and 1987, though now always packaged as one album). The composer was not happy with the limited rehearsal time or with what he felt were subpar efforts from certain portions of the orchestra. The strait-laced playing lacks the attitude and character that you hear on most Zappa albums. There are some creative arrangements, with some interesting percussion flourishes throughout and a surprisingly funky “disco” section added to this album’s version of “Pedro’s Dowry,” but the performances for the most part feel overly sterile and dour
BOULEZ CONDUCTS ZAPPA: THE PERFECT STRANGER (1984) continues the attempts at a proper orchestral rendering of Zappa material, but the results don’t sound any better than on the previous album. The title is also misleading, as French conductor Pierre Boulez and his 29-member Ensemble Intercontemporain are only involved in 3 of the 7 tracks. The remainder was executed by Zappa on the Synclavier, a synthesizer/sampler that allowed him to compose music prohibitively difficult for humans to execute. Either the Synclavier technology was not very advanced yet or Zappa’s skills on it were rudimentary when he made these recordings, which have a thin minimalist sound atypical of his work.
THEM OR US (1984) is Zappa’s last full-blown studio rock album.6 It’s a grab bag of early ‘80s recordings that didn’t fit anywhere else, and I don’t love the very ‘80s freeze-dried hair metal sound of the mix, but the material is generally strong and is varied enough to keep the project engaging over its double-vinyl runtime. Tracks like “Sinister Footwear II” push the virtuosos in Zappa’s early ‘80s band (including guitarist Steve Vai, keyboardist Tommy Mars, and percussionist Ed Mann) to their outer limits, and Zappa’s guitar soloing on that song and many others is among his most deranged. Vai and Zappa’s son Dweezil also get some guitar solo showcases, and while their Eddie Van Halen-style playing isn’t nearly as adventurous as Frank’s it does offer an interesting contrast.
THING-FISH (1984) is the “Original Cast Recording” of a Broadway play that Zappa never raised the budget to actually produce. The story, involving a U.S. government-created disease designed to control the population of “highly rhythmic individuals and sissy boys” that backfires when it causes the victims to become indestructible mutants with Minstrel show outfits physically growing on their bodies, pushes Zappa’s satire to the absolute outer limits of weirdness and obscenity. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on without following along with the libretto in the liner notes, and even then, the social commentary is not terribly coherent. It’s questionable whether a white artist like Zappa has the same right to reappropriate minstrel imagery the way that Spike Lee (in BAMBOOZLED) or Boots Riley (in SORRY TO BOTHER YOU) do, and the anti-racism message is somewhat drowned out by the story’s problematic depictions of homosexuality and feminism. Many of the tracks on the triple-album are bits of dialogue rather than music per se, and a lot of the songs are previously released recordings with new vocals and redone lyrics, making the album of questionable value to hardcore Zappa fans (i.e., the only people who could possibly be interested in hearing it). If you can get on the album’s wavelength it is worth hearing simply to marvel at how bizarre and extreme it is, but it’s certainly a mess and in many ways lives down to its reputation as Zappa’s worst album.
The title and mock Parental Advisory label on the cover of FRANK ZAPPA MEETS THE MOTHERS OF PREVENTION (1985) gives the impression that it’s some sort of concept album about Zappa’s battles with the Parents Music Resource Center, but in fact this is only the subject of the track “Porn Wars.” That’s a 12-minute musique concrete piece combining ominous Synclavier music with words from the Senate hearing about censoring explicit lyrics that Zappa was an opposing witness for, along with dialogue outtakes from the LUMPY GRAVY and THING-FISH sessions. The rest of the album is a grab bag of various rock band songs and Synclavier computer music that is all over the place both in terms of style and quality. The project feels pretty thrown together, but the rock band instrumentals are strong, and “We’re Turning Again,” which mocks romanticization of the ‘60s, is fascinating for how mean-spirited it is about the sacred cows of that era, including the drug-related deaths of some of Zappa’s contemporaries.
Either the Synclavier technology or Zappa’s skill with the machine (or likely a combination of both) had improved significantly in time for JAZZ FROM HELL (1986), an instrumental album consisting almost entirely of computer music. The textures are a lot richer and more varied, and the compositions are denser and more ear-grabbing than the ones on THE PERFECT STRANGER and MEETS THE MOTHERS OF PREVENTION. The one live rock band track (“St. Etienne,” an excellent 1982 guitar solo) transitions seamlessly in between two Synclavier pieces. This is also one of the rare Zappa albums from the ‘80s that doesn’t overstay its welcome or contain any filler.
DREDGING THE ARCHIVES
GUITAR (1988) is a sequel to SHUT UP ‘N PLAY YER GUITAR, though one with less variety and less careful structuring than the earlier set. There are a couple of written pieces (the uncharacteristically straightforward Stevie Ray Vaughan-esque “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace” and a new take on JOE’S GARAGE’s “Watermelon in Easter Hay”), but none of the studio tracks or quasi-acoustic numbers that provided welcome contrast and relief on SHUT UP. The improvised guitar solos, primarily culled from the 1981, 1982, and 1984 tours, are each individually impressive but it does get monotonous to hear 32 of them back-to-back, especially with several backing vamps making multiple appearances.
YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE (1988-1992) is a six-part series of double-disc live albums containing previously unreleased recordings from throughout Zappa’s career. Some cool one-time only events are captured, like a crazy fan hopping up on stage and reciting poetry during a 1979 performance of the “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” suite or police shooting tear gas into a rioting Italian crowd while Zappa’s 1982 band struggles to get through two otherwise unremarkable pop songs of that era. There are also some neat new arrangements of songs, like the 1984 take on “Bamboozled by Love” that turns what was originally a blues pastiche about a guy killing his unfaithful wife into a bouncy New Wave number, and a 1978 rendition of “The Torture Never Stops” where Terry Bozzio’s stomping drums push Zappa to deliver one of his longest and most intense guitar solos. And there’s some excellent songs that weren’t previously released in any format, such as “Thirteen,” an incredible showcase for guest electric violinist L. Shankar.
But too much of the material on the twelve discs is made up of songs that sound an awful lot like their original studio versions, or you-had-to-be-there moments of Zappa monologuing on stage or his band members talking backstage. There’s also an overemphasis on the more virtuosic but less charismatic ‘80s bands and some curious editing choices that seem to remove necessary context from certain experiments. There’s a lot of gems throughout the set, but you have to wade through a lot of inessential material to get to them.
In case the 12 discs of YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE aren’t enough for you, Zappa also released 5 discs of material from his final tour (from 1988) across three albums. These are BROADWAY THE HARD WAY (1989), which mainly focuses on new pop songs mocking the Reagan era’s religious right; THE BEST BAND YOU NEVER HEARD IN YOUR LIFE (1991), which mixes fan favorite deep cuts with warped cover versions of other people’s famous classics; and MAKE A JAZZ NOISE HERE (1992), which highlights the instrumental capabilities of this 12-member lineup. The band is remarkably versatile, and their 5-piece horn section makes even the most familiar material feel fresh, though, as is the case with many of Zappa’s late period albums, one wishes that he’d pared the overall runtimes down.
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THE YELLOW SHARK (1993) contains what are undoubtedly the best performances of Zappa’s classical pieces. The 24-piece German chamber group Ensemble Modern perform some incredibly difficult compositions accurately while also giving them the same amount of attitude and character you’d expect from one of Zappa’s rock groups. There’s a great amount of variety in the tracklist, with some old favorites from the UNCLE MEAT era mixed in with previously unreleased tracks commissioned by other classical groups in the ‘80s or ‘90s, a couple new songs created specifically for these concerts, and, most impressively, new arrangements of Synclavier pieces that were initially written to show off that machine’s ability to perform songs thought to be too fast and complex for humans to play. The most mind-blowing of these is the closing version of JAZZ FROM HELL’s “G-Spot Tornado,” a showstopping display of lightning-fast notes that might be the single most technically impressive thing that any group of musicians has ever executed.
CIVILIZATION PHAZE III (1994) is Frank Zappa’s final statement, the last album that he fully completed (liner notes and all) prior to his December ’93 death from testicular cancer. It’s a two-disc set featuring Synclavier computer music, previously unreleased “piano people” dialogue from the LUMPY GRAVY sessions, and new “piano people” dialogue recorded in the early ‘90s with members of the Ensemble Modern, Moon and Dweezil Zappa, and Michael Rappaport (who was dating Moon at the time). I always wish that I liked this album more than I do, but to be honest it’s a difficult listen, both because a lot of the songs are so insanely difficult that they fly over my head, and because the album has a lot of excesses that make it frustrating to take in as a whole. The spoken word parts don’t segue in and out of the music nearly as smoothly as on LUMPY GRAVY, and the ‘90s dialogue recordings feel like a strained attempt to match the genuine weirdness of the ones from the ‘60s. Some of the more extreme music, like the 18-minute “N-Lite,” feels like Zappa continuously immediately rushing to the next idea before he’s given the listener a chance to absorb whatever was happening a split-second earlier. There are also a few stunningly beautiful pieces like the sorrowful “Amnerika” and the ominous “Dio Fa” that show off how much more textured and colorful the Synclavier pieces could be than in the decade prior, and the closing track “Waffenspiel” (a sound collage of guns firing, rain falling, and a door closing) ends Zappa’s discography on an effectively chilling note. But overall, the album belongs in the same category as 200 MOTELS, JOE’S GARAGE, THING-FISH, and YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, all projects that contain great material drowned out by self-indulgent excess and half-formed ideas.
Unfortunately, the preservation of the album has been very bizarre. Zappa radically remixed the album with new bass and drum performances in 1984, evidently in an effort to spite the former Mothers of Invention members who were then trying to sue him for royalties. The jarring tonal differences between the analog elements recorded in the ‘60s and the digital performances from the ‘80s would be off-putting in any case but sound especially bad in the context of a project whose purpose is to meticulously recreate the sounds of a bygone era. That remix version that nobody likes is inexplicably still what is used for all CD and digital rereleases of the official album, although the Zappa Family Trust have confusingly released the vastly superior original mix under the title GREASY LOVE SONGS.
Due to budget constraints principal photography on the film, and recording of basic tracks for the album, was completed in an absurdly tight window of seven eight-hour days, which surely accounts in part for why both the film and album are so uneven.
I don’t want to get too in the weeds on the plethora of posthumous releases from the Zappa Family Trust, but WAZOO (which documents a concert from a short-lived 20-piece group) and IMAGINARY DISEASES and LITTLE DOTS (which each feature various live recordings from the condensed 9-piece “Petit Wazoo” band) are essential listening for those who like this short-lived iteration of Zappa’s music.
Bassist Patrick O’Hearn and keyboardist/violinist Eddie Jobson appear on the album cover and were in the live group by the time this album was released, but they do not appear on the recordings.
I like these strange experiments but could absolutely understand someone else finding them grating.
Though, like many of Zappa’s “studio” albums from the late ‘70s onwards, it contains a lot of tracks that are actually live recordings with overdubs).