Frank Zappa FREAK

Look here, brother; who you jivin’ with that Cosmik Debris?

Frank’s lyrics are always fantastical and (usually) give me a good little giggle. My favorite is stuff like Montana, Stink-Foot, or Drowning Witch; the silly stories with such particular, eccentrically worded phrases to describe even more eccentric things. The more real satire is kinda hit or miss. Bobby Brown Goes Down puts me on my ass, but SEX is just a chore to listen to. Catholic Girls is a great song, Dinah-Moe Humm is… kinda funky I guess…

Picture from the liner notes of Halloween 73.

Frank’s my favorite guitar player. If I had to pay the ZFT every time I nicked a lick from one of his solos, or physically took notes from a solo I was listening to in order to use later, I would be broke, and we would receive a lot more releases. Sometimes he’s sloppy, yeah. But from ‘73-‘82, he was the best guitar player on the planet to me. Even as his style changed, his guitar playing was always fucking fierce. Whether it’s in a little section like Penguin In Bondage or Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy, or a larger jam like Inca Roads or Advance Romance, or in a straight solo vehicle like The Deathless Horsie or Treacherous Cretins; it is ALWAYS awesome.

This was a good day.

This is for sure my favorite posthumous release. The early ‘80 band is my favorite band Zappa ever had, containing all the great parts of the ‘80s bands, but still with the atmosphere and structure of the ‘70s bands. And on top of all that; I think is the absolute peak of his guitar playing.

Awesome little ad in April 19th, 1969’s issue of Rolling Stone magazine for my favorite Mothers album.

The abundance of writing, different numbers, and weird little beads indicate that this was another attempt at the skull on the back of the sleeve by Cal Shenkel, an artist and longtime collaborator of Zappa’s. It’s also cool to see (who I assume to be) Cal holding the card of Zappa in the process of making the back.

“Zappa In New York” is an album recorded in 1976, and released in 1978, in the midst of Zappa’s lawsuit with Warner Bros. Records. But that’s for another post.

The album was heavily censored. A couple of minutes were sliced from “Titties & Beer” and “Punky’s Whips” was removed entirely, out of fear of offending the song’s subject, guitarist Punky Meadows of Angel, who, in fact, loved the song.

The album follows Zappa’s stints in New York around Halloween and Christmas. He had the SNL studio band at his disposal, and he used them to their fullest. Just compare the vamp the horns play during Zappa’s solo on “I’m The Slime” that appeared on the CD re-release to the Over-Nite Sensation version.

Zappa in the modern world is very strange. I remember when UMG first bought out the ZFT, they announced they were gonna do Zappa NFTs and I was pissed. How could they do something so fucking stupid to the most genius composer of the 20th-21st centuries? But thankfully, those dumb little pictures died out before that happened. But then all the Valley Girl stuff launched, and then came the visualizers. It’s just odd. I’d like to go back to 1964 and tell the starving Zappa, “You’re music’s gonna get a cult following, you’ll have a 30 year career, and there’ll be visualizers of your songs on YouTube in 50 years.”

Why did he have to smoke?

I find it so interesting how Frank is such an intelligent person, someone so ahead of and blazing right through the bullshit of the drug culture as it morphed his whole life, but couldn’t see through the bullshit of tobacco and smoking?

And ultimately, those disgusting little rolls of death are what took this genius from us far too soon.

This is from September of ‘74, in Sweden.