Click through the album title for purchase information:
I’ll never forget the first time I heard the music of that Comic Rock guy Frank Zappa. At the time, I was shoulder-deep in garage band bliss (“wiener type person,” thank you very much, in case you hadn’t heard of us) and eagerly plowing through the Rock Canon of years yonder.
For some reason, I’d always skipped the opportunity to listen to Zappa’s stuff. Then my best-buddy-in-the-world-at-the-time played us some songs after rehearsal. Two-and-a-half songs at the back end of a cassette otherwise consisting of Mudhoney and early Soundgarden.
The first song, “Peaches en Regalia” from Hot Rats, should have been uncool. It was kinda circus-music-played-on-tinny-classical-instrumentsy, but something about the curious twists in the composition perked my young ears. The second track was more of a proper song, a funny tune about some Eskimo kid taking revenge on a seal hunter called “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” from Apostrophe. The song made us giggle (and frown … “is rock music allowed to be funny?”) and then, out of the blue, a blind barrage of solo guitar, about three seconds long.
Our jaws dropped. We rewound. Our jaws dropped again. I was never quite the same.
A year later, I owned around a dozen Frank Zappa albums, and my grunge and rock collection was mysteriously being replaced by experimental jazz and WARP Electronica.
LYRICS EXIST FOR THOSE WHO NEED THEM
Nowadays, aside from the handful of annual Zappa fests, most of his music is performed by internationally acclaimed classical ensembles. A four-meter-high bust of the man overlooks a park somewhere in post-Communist Lithuania. Following Zappa’s death in 1993, U.S. Vice President Al Gore sent a letter of commiseration to his wife Gail. Quite the hullabaloo for a man most remember as a ’70s rock musician who wrote funny and crude novelty songs.
Sculpting around 70 albums over the course of a 28-year career, Frank Zappa’s music is inexhaustibly diverse, and unmatched for sheer originality. Informed by a wacky palette ranging from ’50s doo-wop and rhythm and blues to the avant-garde experiments of composers like Stravinsky and Varese’, Zappa concocted a heterogenous signature that is instantly recognizable despite the wild diversity of his compositions.
DON’T YOU BOYS KNOW ANY NICE SONGS?
Joe’s Garage, his 1979 concept album, is a musical tour-de-force. It explores a dystopian future where music and other perversions like free thought and sensuality have been banned because, well, they disrupt the efficiency of the carefully groomed workforce – otherwise known as society. The album’s narrative follows a by-now-familiar Orwellian arc: Naive hero Joe shrugs off society’s prescriptions and, instead of joining the grotesquely bland assembly-line on offer, starts a band and tries to get a girlfriend. Oops.
Zappa being Zappa, the superficially formulaic storyline careens and swells to explore and poke fun at such phenomena as Scientology, the contradiction of music journalism, the abject nature of wet T-shirt contests, the melodramatic highs and lows of starting a band, pornographic robots and the evils of selling your soul.
Instrumentally, the album teems with wonder – from the impossible time signatures of “Keep It Greasy” to the off-kilter rock splendor of “Why does It Hurt When I Pee?,’ from mutant funk and Venusian jazz to the melancholic, grandiose eloquence of guitar solos “He Used to Cut the Grass,” “On the Bus” and “Watermelon in Easter Hay.” (The latter is one of the most affecting pieces ever executed on six strings.)
In the end, Joe’s Garage is a great introduction into the quantum sonics of one of the 20th century’s greatest composers, and one of humankind’s most fierce and eloquent defenders of free speech and individualism.
