The Mothers Of Invention / Frank Zappa

By Bart Testa

The Rolling Stone Record Guide, 1979

THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION / FRANK ZAPPA

★★★★ Absolutely Free / Verve V/V6-5013X
★★★★ Freak Out / Verve V6-5005-2
★★★ Mothermania / Biz./Verve V6-5068
★ The Worst of the Mothers / Verve SE-4754
★★★★★ We're Only in It for the Money / Verve V6-5045X

The Mothers of Invention, led by Frank Zappa, shocked the Sixties "underground" into early self-recognition with the intellectual arrogance and wit of Freak Out. Here, at last, was an album that interjected the ironic modes of pop art (as practiced by Rosenquist, Warhol and Dine) into rock & roll and made it work. Dylan's lyrics had already put down love-song cliches, and others had attempted arty experiments with rock, but Zappa took the whole form through a grand mutation.

One disc of the double record consists of robust parodies of mid-Sixties suburbia. Zappa knew his pop ready-mades well enough to render them into effective songs like "You Didn't Try to Call Me" and "How Could I Be Such a Fool," but it was Ray Collins' extraordinary pop-operatic vocals that best conveyed the not-so-mock rage.

The other disc is rock's first experimental music masterpiece, influenced mainly by such modem composers as Edgar Varèse, but with an anarchist aggression that is far more defiantly celebratory than arty. "Help, I'm a Rock" and "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" created an enduring aural landscape over which Zappa's mythic heroes – from Suzy Creamcheese to his current Sadean libertine of "The Torture Never Stops" – have quested in various stages of numbed distress ever since.

Stuck in among these avant-garde excursions is "Trouble Comin' Everyday." Zappa's own brilliantly ugly vocal growls over the Mothers' lunging ancestor, heavy-metal rock. Along with "Help, I'm a Rock," "Trouble" darkly anticipates the political themes of imprisonment and suffocation that obsess Zappa on Absolutely Free and We're Only in It for the Money.

Both of those albums should have dated badly. While often hailed for Zappa's "montage" editing, which turned regular rock-song forms inside out, the popularity of the LPs rests on satire. Surprisingly, they have dated very little. Aside from a few topical references, the prison/insane asylum/shopping mall algebra still stings and the essentially structural intelligence of Zappa's montage remains awesome.

Absolutely Free takes on "straight" America with "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," "Plastic People" and "America Drinks and Goes Home" to create a pop horror show worthy of Hans Bellmer's dolls, whose violent overtones Zappa was deliberately evoking in his live shows.

We're Only in It for the Money was intended to serve as a Brechtian (as in "alienation effect") answer to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it is a relent less savaging of "hip" America, for which the Beatles' album was providing an appropriately naive soundtrack. Zappa's tone is never less than ominous. His montage techniques are now perfected, and he weaves chillingly munchkin pop-song sections into white noise, spoken sections and Varèsian segments mounting up to his horrific 'The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny." The suitable text, he tells us in his liner notes, is Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," while the music itself is a fright ening idication that if Zappa expected anything of the Sixties, it was the antichrist, not the Aquarian Age. Still, "Mother People" posits a cautiously rationalist humanism as something to which his fans might aspire. As he would reveal with his next albums, Zappa wasn't really the Dada nihilist of his public reputation.

The compilation albums should be avoided. Zappa was working in a strict album format, although he himself put Mothermania together, which makes it preferable.

★★★★ Burnt Weeny Sandwich / Biz. 6370
★★★★★ Uncle Meat / Biz. 2MS-2024
★★★★ Weasels Ripped My Flesh / Biz. 2028

Uncle Meat, the last album recorded by the original Mothers, was part of Zappa's sustained effort to use musical means to create extended works. (Lumpy Gravy, Zappa's deleted first solo album, is also part of this process.) Although the montage techniques are still used to great advantage, they are now joining together longer and more discrete elements. The effect achieved is a blend rather than a collision. As the Mothers grew into a superb instrumental ensemble, Zappa also worked in extended, jazz-like solos, and his appropriations from modern composers also continued.

Here, Zappa the moralist-satirist temporarily disappears, replaced by an incarnation as metaphysician. The vocal fragments, spoken parts and even the songs consist largely of autobiographical allusions, poetic texts, linguistic games and gnomic manifestoes on aesthetics. The result is Zappa's most personal work. Meat and the later-released Weeny and Weasels (consisting of selections from the vast career retrospective Zappa once planned) are the best records by Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

The missing artifact from this period is Ruben and the Jets, the set of doo-wop parodies that are autobiographical in another way. The set is deleted, which is unfortunate, although Zappa's sincere affection for doo-wop's aching sweetness was overwhelmed by sheer weariness and a dry sense of something neither Zappa nor the Mothers could emotionally entertain.

★ Just Another Band from L.A. / Biz. 2075
★★ Mothers Live at the Fillmore East – June 1971 / Biz, 2042
★★★ The Grand Wazoo / Rep. 2093

This is Zappa's most disorganized period, because so much of his work immediately following the dissolution of the Mothers is deleted. The best album, Hot Rats (Bizarre), was a long-awaited guitar showcase for Zappa, who had previously repressed his own playing on records. Chunga's Revenge featured Flo and Eddie, and was recorded just before the formation of a second Mothers lineup. Zappa's sarcastic intelligence is indefatigable here, but it's quite clear that both his icy anger and serious imagination were spent before Chunga was recorded.

The band that recorded Live at the Fillmore and Just Another Band had taken on the character of a cynical joke. These Mothers could play excitingly and entertainingly, but in the end, the albums witness a woeful attenuation of Zappa's best ideas and instincts. The Grand Wazoo is a return to the full horn-section arranging he'd almost forsaken after Uncle Meat. In its modest way – Zappa has seldom been so understated – Wazoo is a fusion-music gem that almost manages to sound like art rock.

★★ Bongo Fury / Discr. 2234
★★★ One Size Fits All / Discr. 2216
★★★ Over-Nite Sensation / Discr. K-2288
★★ The Roxy and Elsewhere / Discr. 2DS-2202

On these albums, Zappa achieves a nicely formulaic plateau. Having discarded, or stored away, most of his compositional experiments, Zappa now writes regular rock songs that in turn resemble Chicago, Santana and John McLaughlin in structure, though usually a quirk beat change or keyboard flourish acts as a signature. The lyrics are cozily scatological, casually pornographic or smugly satirical. As Roxy demonstrates, Zappa has found a congenial audience that considers him a showbiz eccentric in between the heated mathematical guitar solos that have become his main order of business. The studio albums are better, simply because they're more amply produced and cleverly arranged than Roxy.

Bongo Fury is a collaboration with Captain Beefheart and a depressing edition of more-of-the-same, a very minor Trout Mask Replica lyrically, with the band restlessly twanging.

All these records are enjoyable, if only for the pleasure of Zappa being very much his competent self. However, they do suggest that the cautiously rational humanist in him has overcome his imagination.

– B.T.

Source: archive.org