Absolutely Frank
By Alan di Perna
★★★★★
The Frank Zappa Catalog
Rykodisc
FRANK ZAPPA WAS not your stereotypical guitar hero. The guitar wasn't his phallus. It wasn't his tool of empowerment, his sole claim to fame, the only thing that saved him from having to stand on a freeway off-ramp, holding up a cardboard sign. Guitar playing was just one of many things that Frank Zappa did amazingly well. Like Jimi Hendrix, Zappa had a part of him that made most others' seem puny and woefully inadequate. But in Frank's case, the organ in question was his brain. And he didn't need a long piece of wood strung with metal wires as a symbol or extension of that. Guitar was just one of many implements that Zappa used in his work as one of our era's most gifted and provocative composers and satirists.
But guitar was one very important implement for Zappa as must be abundantly clear to anyone who listens through the whole Zappa catalog, which has just been reissued by Rykodisc in pristine new remasters. The Ryko project, a pretty impressive monolith in its own right, comprises almost all the more than 60 albums Frank officially released in his lifetime. (The exceptions are 200 Motels, which Ryko is currently negotiating to add to the list, Rhino's "Beat the Boots" series of concert recordings and Zappa's 1969-'70 collaborations with jazz violinist Jean Luc Ponty, Canteloupe Island and King Kong). Most of the new Ryko discs were newly remastered by, or with the approval of, Zappa toward the end of his life. The original album artwork has also been restored wherever possible.
There's little on these discs in the way of the bonus tracks, studio rarities or other little "extras" that are often a part of CD reissues. Most notably, however, 1967's We're Only In It For The Money has been restored to its original form. (In the Eighties, Zappa released a version with overdubs by contemporary musicians not in the original Mothers of Invention.) What the project amounts to is a definitive, "authorized edition" of Zappa's life work – a project that Frank initiated after learning he was fatally ill.
It is impossible to review 56 complex, challenging, generally brilliant albums in the space of a dozen or so paragraphs. What follows are a few rough guidelines to the Zappa oeuvre, with a particular view to Mr. Z.'s stunning guitar work. First off, the 1966-'69 recordings with the original Mothers of Invention are absolutely indispensable and are the cornerstone on which Zappa's well-deserved fame rests. It's hard to imagine now, but Zappa was a young, fledgling artist on those records, just discovering his own prodigious capabilities. You can hear him surprising himself – something he rarely did once he gained greater control of his craft. The original versions of Zappa standards like "Call Any Vegetable" (from 1967's Absolutely Free) have a freshness that just isn't there on the Master's fourth or fifth recorded reprisal of the song later in his career, no matter how much Chad Wackcrman's drum technique was superior to Jimmy Carl Black's.
Every American home should possess a copy of Freak Out (1966), the first Mothers of Invention album. The sound may seem dated to younger listeners, but Zappa's take on topics like homelessness and racial tension ring just as true today as they did nearly 30 years ago. Freak Out also shows that Frank Zappa was an amazing guitarist right out of the box. Listen to the way his solo on "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" unfolds. It starts off as the kind of mid-Sixties rock-out you might hear on a McCoys' single, but subtly grows to transcend its garage rock context thanks to those deft little triplet figures that were always a hallmark of Zappa's style. Then listen to the way Frank and second guitarist Elliot Ingber mesh, and to the bluesy, extended rave up on "Trouble Every Day" – and remember that Frank Zappa, along with the Yardbirds, was one of the people who helped ignite the vogue for protracted instrumental solos in rock music.
Blues was one of Zappa's great improvisational inspirations. Free jazz was another. Absolutely Free's "Invocation And Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin" is an important early statement of that side of his guitar playmg, as is Uncle Meat's rubato romp, "Nine Types Of Industrial Pollution." Uncle Meat, incidentally, is the best Frank Zappa/Mothers album of all time.
But the early Seventies were the period when Zappa really emerged as a hot rock guitarist. The sublime, almost-all-instrumental Hot Rats (1969) is generally, and rightly, regarded as Zappa's "coming out" record – the one which announced to the world that Frank Zappa was a serious composer/arranger/guitarist who didn't need funny" lyrics or comical sidemen to gain attention. But if you're looking for buzzy, glorious guitar pyrotechnics, you'll find even more to please you on 1970's Chunga s Revenge. "Transylvania Boogie" shows off Zappa's scalar adventurousness, as skewed Arabic intervals skitter about like lopsided baby crabs before diving headlong into a swamp of croaking blues pentatonics. On "Tell Me You Love Me" (a song much reprised on later albums), Zappa embraces the corny theatrics of early Seventies heavy metal with fervor and aplomb.
Weasels Ripped My Flesh, also released in 1970, is another must for guitar fans, comprised of some superb material – live and otherwise – from the Mothers' 1967-'69 period. On these recordings, you can hear the birth of the quintessential Zappa guitar timbre – that squonking wah wah baritone and those plectrum hammer-on trills that swell up like lethal serpents in a steamy jungle of guitar notes. This is also the period when Zappa found that lighter, cleaner "munchkin" tone he preferred for jazzier compositions like "20 Small Cigars" (Chunga's Revenge) and "It Must Be A Camel" (Hot Rats). From the early Seventies period, you also don't want to miss 1972's The Grand Wazoo – with horn charts to die for – and '74's Bongo Fury, with Frank's high school buddy Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart.
By the mid-Seventies, Zappa's guitar playing had taken another quantum leap, as evidenced by his dizzying workout on "Black Napkins," from 1976's Zoot Allures – a caloric confection of blinding staccato phrasing and soaring, sustained, high-string climaxes. Frank was always involved in and influenced by contemporary musical idioms. And from the mid-Seventies onward, his guitar soloing took on a fusionesque, "shreddy" quality that has endeared his latter-day work to listeners who are mainly attuned to that end of the guitar spectrum. But the late Seventies through the early Eighties were hardly Zappa's most inspired songwriting period. Where he'd once been an Angry Young Man – an idealistic rebel at odds with an unjust world – he'd now become a bitter, middle-aged grouch with some pretty ugly hangups about sex. Sheik Yerbouti ('79), the incredibly sophomoric Joe's Garage ('79), You Are What You Is and Tinseltown Rebellion (both '81) are painfully low points in the otherwise excellent Zappa catalog. An embarrassment like " Jewish Princess" ( from Sheik Yerbouti) helps you understand what Jefferson Airplane, Starship vocalist Grace Slick meant when she called Zappa "the most intelligent asshole I ever met."
In a sense, the rise of Ronald Reagan and the Republican party during the Eighties rescued Frank Zappa by giving him a more worthwhile target than people who like to dance in clubs. But no matter how lackluster and humorless Zappa's songwriting ideas became, the quality of his musical execution never flagged. And not one of those late-Seventies, early-Eighties albums doesn't include at least one awe-inspiring guitar instrumental – "Rat Tomago" from Sheik; "Watermelon In Easter Hay" from Joe's Garage; "Theme From The 3rd Movement Of Sinister Footwear" on You Are What You Is, etc ... Maybe somebody ought to gather up all those instrumental highlights and put them on a separate record.
Frank had very much the same idea himself when he released Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar (1981) and then Guitar (1988) – albums which strung to gether some of his favorite live guitar solos, surgically removed from the songs in which they originally appeared. By this point, of course, electric guitar soloing was just one small part of Zappa's universe. He'd become quite involved in the computerized musical possibilities of the Synclavier. He was writing for orchestras with increasing frequency and had become active in the political arena. Yet his live concerts – which he routinely taped – provided a wealth of material. Zappa's was one of the few live rock bands in history capable of giving studio-quality performances night after night. Live performances were often used as basic tracks on Zappa studio albums, and they of course filled up seven volumes of the generally impressive You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series (1988-'92) and provided the basis for Broadway The Hard Way (1988) and The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life (1991).
Zappa's live guitar solos, taken out of context , prove that he wasn't just talking shit when he told journalists he regarded improvisation as a form of instant composition. The axe solo records – particularly Guitar – are amazing in their continuity. Part of this can be put down to Zappa's inspired editing, but it also owes much to the structural integrity of the solos themselves.
What's most revelatory about the solos, however, is their expressiveness and emotional range. It's hard to conceive that such an obsessively organized, verbal, punctilious, anal, right-brained guy like Zappa was also capable of such passionate, instinctual, emotionally "naked" playing. But then, Frank Zappa was always full of surprises. And thanks to the Ryko reissues, his momentous body of work will continue to surprise, provoke and inspire us.
Read by OCR software. If you spot errors, let me know afka (at) afka.net