Zappa: Original Soundtrack Album (Zappa Records)
Borrowed from library
There's a lot for me to unpack concerning Frank Zappa.
His music was one of the first things that really grabbed as a teenager and said, "Listen to this!" My father, in addition to having an interesting and sizable record collection, also made many tapes of borrowed records. When I say tapes, I mean 1/4" reel to reel tapes for home consumption. This was before cassettes dominated the medium. He'd record several albums on slow speed onto a tape, and could play them for more than an hour a side while he painted.
Dad taught at Louisiana State University from 1965-1970; my earliest memories are of living in West Baton Rouge/Port Allen. He'd borrow records from everyone, students and colleagues alike. So imagine the selection at the time: there were tapes of Charles Mingus, Roland Kirk, Cream, Led Zeppelin. He had an opinion on most of what he dubbed, so he actively listened when he was dubbing the albums. Of the artists who were current at the time, he's said it was Jimi Hendrix who impressed him most. He liked the music first and foremost, but liked the group's flamboyant look as well.
I was digging through the tapes on my own. He never wrote down song titles, which often frustrated me. There were some discoveries in those tapes for me, one of the first being Charles Mingus' Mingus Ah Um (he also had a physical copy). After that, the tape that really caught me started with Frank Zappa's Hot Rats. What was this? I surely knew Frank Zappa's name, but had never dived into the music before. "Peaches En Regalia." It was crazy, funny, and even catchy. The rest of the album was equally unusual and captivating.
Soon after, I discovered a tape entirely of Mothers of Invention records: Absolutely Free, We're Only In It For the Money, Uncle Meat, and a little bit of Cruising With Ruben and the Jets. I loved it. It was almost as if this music was created for me to discover. It was weird, funny, aggressive, absurd, original. Fred Frith once described the early Mothers albums as being music that's both light and funny, and absolutely serious. (That's not verbatim.) It's a pretty good description.
While I loved it all, it was the track "Ian Underwood Whips It Out Live in Copenhagen." I'd never heard the saxophone played in any way like this before , and that piece casts a long shadow over my own playing.
So, on the one hand, Frank Zappa's music has been essential for me. I remain a fan of the original Mothers recordings in particular, though I like much of his work through 1975, and particular albums or pieces since then.
What happens at and after 1975? That's the time of the last band of his that I thought had real personality. It's the (rather brief) period when he's working with George Duke, Ruth Underwood, Chester Thompson, Napoleon Murphy Brock. Apostrophe' to One Size Fits All. The music is still fun and funny, seriously played by a band with amazing chops, with enough looseness to play around with the material from time to time.
After that? It's a very mixed bag for me. The first I bought for myself was Sheik Yerbouti, and it's a very mixed bag in my current opinion. I hate to use the word "offensive," but I will anyway. I wouldn't have said that about his earlier work, for as occasionally outrageous as it could be. I think one of the purposes of humor is to poke at the powerful. Frank was always a humorist to some extent (or just as much, an absurdist). His work would not only become more sexually explicit (such as, "Briefcase Boogie" or "Broken Hearts are for Assholes") and also poke at people less powerful ("Bobby Brown" about men "becoming" homosexual, or making fun of Wild Man Fischer on Civilization Phase III). And on top of it all, the music for his rocks bands was decreasingly interesting to me.
Here's this movie, Zappa. It was directed by Alex Winter, the Ted of Bill & Ted. It was authorized and organized by Gail, Frank's widow, and his children Ahmet and Diva. Gail gave controlling interest in the family trust to those two, with lesser control for Moon and Dweezil.
That in itself is a long and ugly story, one that I don't need to recount. Better to find details online.
The movie? It's a fan piece. There are some amazing film clips I've never seen before, and it's worth a view for that reason alone. It's also noticeably lacking in any criticism of Frank's work, and many criticisms can be made. Maybe it's not fair of me to expect that from a feature length film.
The soundtrack album? Some of it I've heard before, a few things new. Most of the first disc is focused on earliest Mothers, up to the Flo and Eddie band, with some sidebars for Varése, Stravinsky, the GTOs, and Alice Cooper, his biggest discovery. The second disc covers a longer time, from Flo and Eddie to a track from The Yellow Shark. Four of the last five tracks are drawn from Frank's later rock albums, and...eh. Just confirms that I don't generally like those records.
The third disc is incidental music from the movie, composed by John Frizzell, Nick Cimity, and David Stahl. Maybe I'll put it on, but, the filmmakers couldn't find something appropriate from Frank's library for background scoring?
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