Frank Zappa: Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar
By Span Hanna
Frank Zappa
Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar
(CBS)
For me, the best album the Mothers of Invention ever released was Weasels Ripped My Flesh. It was the first of their albums I bought (alter hearing the Mothermenia sampler) and was as far removed from my expectations as I could then imagine. It took a while to hunt up the early, satirical records on import, and in the meantime i came across Hot Rats, Chunga's Revenge, and the live spinoffs from 200 Motels which were then starting to appear.
While appreciating the diversity of his work from 1967 to 1973, the Zappa I truly appreciated belonged to the midperiod stuff in which he flirted with jazz-rock line pure music. His 1973 concert at Apollo Stadium largely pursued this style and affirmed those impressions. When he eventually returned to lyrical stutt and overdone, repetitious, state jokes, I went off him completely.
Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar is the album I have subconsciously awaited ever since. The boxed set of three albums consists entirely of guitar solos from live recordings dating from 1979. Given that solos are usually a climatic point in rock and roll, it makes a considerably intense offering.
Many of the themes and motifs around which Zappa works here are necessarily similar an repetitive. He knows about half a dozen genuinely unique tunes and exploits them in appropriate contexts. Listening to the whole album can be a strain, but also surprisingly interesting. Because Zappa is a good guitarist, if a somewhat technically obsessed one, and exciting to listen to. And alter all, this is the album I wanted to hear for eight or nine years.
If the album seems to be a compilation of highlights, that is because that is what it is. If it lacks a sense of deliberate construction (a guitar album conceived and composed as such from the word go), that is because he has yet to do that. If he does, I'll be keeping my eyes open for it. As it stands, this compilation is a welcome change from his general output.
The second and third albums of the set impress me the most. The first two sides tend to be a bit clattery. Zappa has probably done his best to insure that the arrangement of cuts is the best possible with available material, although a definite lack of continuity remains.
Nevertheless, more of the same would be welcome. It probably annoys Zappa, but his true strength is here rather than in his pretentious and often mealymouthed attempts at social criticism.