Rock

By Joyce Pelcha, Michael O'Donoghue

East Village Other, 18 June 1969

By JOYCE PLECHA with snappy repartee By MICHAEL O' DONOGHUE

This is a record review. What's the only thing you want to know after reading a record review? BUT IT ... further ... BUY ANYTHING BY THE MOTHERS, they don't know how to make a bad album. Now the rest of this is diddling, you can pick up on it if you want ... I remember when it all started the first time I heard Freak Out ... and thought it was a bunch of acid bums having a good time ... ah, yes ... little did we know (boys and girls) that it was the beginning of the young peoples' concert, arranged and conducted by F. Zappa ... oh marvelous name, who could imagine ... "do you wanna see my driver's license?" he said. "I can't tell when you're telling the truth." "I'm not." "How do I know anything you've said to me ... " "You don't." Later much later. Some of us grow and some of us stay ... standing ovations at the Fillmore East for the memory of what excited us in the past ... lost Cream, Airplane and their imitations ... ok, ok; but some of us have grown and some of us want to ... and where are we after all? still at the Haight, hardly. Today there is UNCLE MEAT (not an imitation of any thing) a composition ... with flavor, like the first time ... everybody's first love.

"There are some people whose total life thrusts and kicks inside them that to look at them is to think they will live for eighty, ninety, a hundred years. They have accepted their meat as well as their mind, and they are calmly dug in." Liner notes from Eric Dolphy's Here & There. So who have we had since Gershwin? Our American composer, Frank Zappa whose UNCLE MEAT has cross references like a notated Ulysses. Thy: Albert Ayler in Spirits Rejoice, Stockhausen's Momente; Edgar Varèse: Ionisation, Density 21.5, Integrales, Octandre; Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch; Omette Coleman.

I met Michael O'Donoghue at Limbo's ... "What are you doing tonight?", I asked. Later Michael said, "We all know the sound of one hand clapping ... UNCLE MEAT clapping is ...

  1. A Crumb cartoon gone mad with power!
  2. Club-footed Old Gold Dancing Cigarette Packs!
  3. Musique pre-stressed concrete!
  4. Godzilla doing a Lincoln Log number on downtown Tokyo Mothra zapping Rodan; Mothra, Rodan & Godzilla zapping Chydra, the 3-headed monster!
  5. All the worlud's a stash!
  6. A bugging device artfully concealed in a St. Adrian Co. urinal.
  7. Duck-tail haircuts pink and charcoal-grey shirts with "Mr. C" collars; dim memories of flaming lipstick on your Jocky Shorts after the drive-in movie where you got your first blowjob!
  8. " ... and remember that one bottle of Geritol contains more iron than a full 5 lbs. of calves liver! Now let's bring on the musical grocery boy from Muncia, Indiana! What do you plan to do for us tonight?" "I'm going to play the Moog Synthesizer, Mr. Mack ... WITH MY TEETH!"
  9. A crash pad for somnambulists.
  10. Occasionally, Aaron Copland on speed!
  11. None, all or even some of the above, not necessarily in that order ... Listen to this record listen to you. Then think about Organized Sound ... all sound, every sound, your sound, silence. Imagine what it would be like to breath creatively. "I've come home to my mothers" ... nobody ever left ... did they, did I, did you? Try not listening to Uncle Meat while it's playing.