I spent my formative years getting high with pig farmers. I’d recommend it to anyone. We drove through the high corn on moonless nights with the headlights off and did other dumb ass shit, and we listened exclusively to Frank Zappa. Ours was a total Zappatista cult. We thought being Zappa freaks made us look smart and avant-garde and weird. He was our badge of intellectual superiority over all the lunkheads listening to Bad Company, and the symbol of our status as unrepentant heads.
Odd thing, though. I haven’t listened to Frank Zappa in more than three decades. I can’t. His music annoys the fuck out of me. Why, it’s almost enough to make me believe smoking pot really does make you stupid. (It doesn’t.) I can’t stand his juvenile sense of humor (yellow snow, etc.), his big bland jazz (Sun Ra he wasn’t), all those annoying xylophones and sound effects, or the smug, sneering, hipper-than-thou tone of his voice. His music is a four-way intersection with a non-working red light where rock, jazz, orchestral music, and musique concrète collide, and everything happens too fast. When I listen to him now (which I don’t, but I did for this review) all I really want to hear are the guitar solos.
Which is not say the self-taught Zappa, who produced some 6,000 albums starting with 1966’s Freak Out and ending with his death in 1993, didn’t—when he cut the crap and condescended to rock—bequeath us some great songs. “WPLJ,” “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama,” “Willie the Pimp,” “Directly From My Heart to You,” “Them or Us,” “Flower Punks,” “Dirty Love,” “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” (real noise rock!), “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” “Outside Now,” “Apostrophe’”, “Black Napkins,” “Why Don’tcha Do Me Right?,” “Trouble Every Day”: why, I just put together a great compilation album composed exclusively of songs free of jazz, orchestral, and musique concrète flourishes, which says more about me than Zappa, I suppose. At some point I stopped freaking out and learned to love the bomb—of straight-up rock’n’roll that is, which I once dismissed as not smart or precocious enough for the snotty “brilliant” likes of me.
I’m not one of those who thought Zappa lost the thread when he ditched original band The Mothers of Invention. I actually prefer his later work, because he plays more guitar. It’s difficult for me now to name my favorite Zappa album, because I find some of them (Uncle Meat, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, the Joe’s Garage LPs) largely unlistenable, and others brilliant and frustrating in turn, but none of them compelling from beginning to end. Hot Rats (1969) doesn’t blow me away as it once did (although “Willie the Pimp” and “Son of Mr. Green Genes” still sound great), nor does the live/studio 1975 Zappa-Captain Beefheart collaboration Bongo Fury. Ditto for 1970’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh (despite its great cover and coupla great rockers) and Freak Out.
So I finally decided to review 1974’s apostrophe (‘) both because it was my fave as a youth and the LP playing the day my pig farmer pal Billy and I were smoking reefer in my room in Shippensburg, PA when a policeman appeared—poof!—like Satan through the billowing clouds of pot smoke, causing Billy to fling the pipe over his shoulder and yours truly to cry, “We surrender!”
apostrophe (‘) —Zappa’s 19th and highest charting LP—is a concept album, or half of one at least; Side A tells the story of Nanook the Eskimo Boy, while the second half is about who knows what. Anyway, opener “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” is a better song than I remember it, catchier and with great backing vocals, but I’ll never really like it because the whole “yellow snow” shtick has come to represent Zappa’s essentially puerile sense of humor to me. Fortunately it’s over before you know it, and “Nanook Rubs It” has started. It features some astounding guitar rips—Zappa, whatever else can be said about him, was one of the greatest rock guitarists ever—and a fantastic solo, more great backing vocals doing this and that, and some funny lyrics. Unfortunately it also includes all the things I find so annoying about Zappa. Xylophones—how I hate those mofos—brief jazz flourishes, and all the other startling zig zags and ding-dang-doodle from his bag of musical tricks are here, along with more infantile jokes about “dog doo snow cones” and “husky wee wee.”
“St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast” is everything I don’t like about Zappa crammed into one song. It’s well-played bad music (the melody blows, frankly) and far too busy for my ears, and it reminds me slightly of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, except that their sense of humor is at the Monty Python level while Zappa’s is Benny Hill quality at best. Its xylophone intro, big orchestral jazz flourishes, and section that can only be described as ELP-like prog all drive me nuts. Throw in the fact that there must be six thousand tempo changes in its one minute and fifty-one seconds, and what you have is a song guaranteed to blow you away if you’re on acid but just flat-out irk you otherwise.
As for “Father O’Blivion,” it begins promisingly enough, racing along like an Eskimo on a rocket-powered dog sled. And I like its ending, where Zappa sings “Good morning your highness, oooh.” Unfortunately everything in between is “St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast” redux. Oodles of tempo changes, a brief synthesizer interlude, talk of leprechauns and “rock around the crock”—it all screams Attention Deficit Disorder to me, although I suppose people who value musical virtuosity for its own sake will suck this stuff up with a sporf.
“Cosmik Debris” opens with a great guitar riff, then Zappa talks and talks, until he’s interrupted (whew!) by some vocalists who sound like they came straight out of a Steely Dan song. The sound effects get on my nerves, as do the fucking xylophones and the horns, but I’m willing to forgive it all because the Zappa solo that follows is so transcendentally brilliant it’ll cause your synapses to sizzle like bug zappers. As will the fast passage that follows shortly thereafter. For the first time on apostrophe (‘) Zappa is rocking out, and doesn’t sound like a sneering adolescent sarcasm machine. And the ending, where Zappa says, “Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?” strikes me as bona fide funny, and not so much middle school snicker snicker.
“Excentrifugal Force” moves along at a nice clip and features a mesmeric guitar solo and a funky backdrop, but the sound effects annoy me and the lyrics strike me as so much gibberish. But it’s brief and segues into the album’s primo cut and tour de force, “apostrophe (‘) ” an unrepentant freak-out of an instrumental featuring the great Jack Bruce on bass and the legendary Jim Gordon on drums. “apostrophe (‘) ” opens with titanic riffs, then a long fuzz bass solo by Bruce with Zappa contributing lots of jabbing riffs. Then it slows down some and the two both go at it together, stopping long enough for Gordon to play a short bashing solo, then starting again with Gordon crashing away on the cymbals like a madman who would go on to kill his mother, which he did nine years later. It’s one powerful, propulsive piece of music, and an example of what Zappa was capable of when he set out to rock out, and abandoned for the nonce the fiendishly complex tempo changes, lightning-fast switches from horns to xylophones to didgeridoo, and all of his other avant-garde tics.
The anti-racist protest song “Uncle Remus” is great too, from its pretty melody (and lovely opening piano) to the female backing singers who accompany Zappa on vocals. There’s a short but fantastic guitar solo, then Zappa sings, “I’ll take a drive to Beverly Hills/Just before dawn/And knock the little jockeys off the rich peoples’ lawn/And before they get up/I’ll be gone, I’ll be gone.” Then he follows that with a scorching guitar solo while the backing singers continue to wail away. Throw in the phrase, “I can’t wait til my ‘fro is full-grown,” and you’ve got a winner. The same goes for “Stink-Foot,” despite its juvenile subject matter. A mid-tempo number about “the place where they keep the imaginary diseases,” I’m not thrilled by Zappa’s monologue, but his jabbing guitar riffs are fantastic, and I his “Arf Arf Arf” followed by laughter amuses me despite myself. It in turn leads into a miracle of a guitar solo that goes on and on, while the band crashes away far off in the distance. I also like the dog’s monologue, and the backup vocalists who come in singing, “The poodle bites/The poodle chews it,” which is followed by yet another mouth-dropping solo that takes you to the end of the song.
So there you have it. A Frank Zappa album that is neatly divided into a side A that I don’t much like, and a side B that I’m surprised to discover I still love as much as when I was a teenage bong wrangler. I don’t pretend to know everything, and may well be the wanker one Charles Mumford (now a pal; he gave me permission to use his name) recently described me as on Facebook. But wanker or no, I will maintain until my dying day that Zappa frittered away much of his extraordinary genius hawking juvenile tropes and cluttering up his songs with everything but Aquaggaswack solos.
You can hardly blame a guy for following his muse, and Zappa’s fascination with orchestral music, jazz, and musique concrète, and yes even his puerile sense of humor, were as integral to his art as the rock forays I love so much. Still. If the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe, that don’t mean jack shit to me the way it did when Zappa was my hero. Now I just want the man to shut up and play his fucking guitar.
Since his death Zappa has had all sorts of honors heaped upon him, and everything from dinosaurs to asteroids bear his name. But I think the most appropriate homage was bestowed upon him by the three Maryland biologists who dubbed zapA the gene from the bacterium Proteus Mirabilis, which causes urinary tract infections. Even Frank, I think, would have appreciated that one.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
