David Walley
Freak Out was a conceptual masterpiece…. [It] served as a living testament to L.A. freakdom, a truly honest work…. It captured the essence of the American Experience with songs like "Who Are the Brain Police."… (p. 60)
Freak Out also had some outrageous parodies of Fifties rhythm and blues tunes with "Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder."… The songs on the first record dealt for the most part with common reality. The pieces of extended music on the second record were unheard of during that impoverished period of rock and roll imagination.
Side Three of Freak Out contained two memorable compositions: "Trouble Coming Every Day," a song about the Watts riots … and "Help I'm a Rock," a stomp for L.A. freakdom. (pp. 60-1)
[Absolutely Free] was filled with images of Americana all reversed. It contained many of Zappa's classics…. (p. 75)
Zappa's themes key in to the later albums also. Absolutely Free was more musically complex than Freak Out…. Some of the songs were clearly a direct comment on what Zappa had been experiencing at the time—the rampant social stupidity of the Sunset Strip riots, for instance. (p. 76)
Absolutely Free featured [a] magnificent two-part production number on Side Two: "America Drinks," and "America Drinks and Goes Home." First time through the number is scatjazz, a densely orchestrated piece with cheap cocktail lyrics…. The lyrics were incongruous given the musical setting. (pp. 76-7)
Lumpy Gravy was by far the most ambitious project Zappa had worked on to date…. It was a mixed media presentation. Zappa intercut spoken sections with musical quotes from Varèse, Stravinsky, some surf music—"a little nostalgia for the old folks"—and schlock symphonic treatments of old Zappa themes. (pp. 87-8)
Lumpy Gravy also introduced Zappa's theory of the big note. He maintains that everything in the universe is made from one element which is a note—atoms are really vibrations and all part of the big note…. Lumpy Gravy was a quote using time and those vibrations. It was probably the most far-reaching of all Zappa's published works to date. (p. 88)
Lumpy Gravy served as a cross reference to We're Only in it for the Money. Zappa the social critic again leaped into the generational breach. (p. 89)
Money contained the most biting satire—it was vicious and merciless. On one track one hears quite audibly, "Flower Power sucks." It not only castigated the phony freaks, but lambasted their parents for not understanding what was happening. No one was immune from this attack which lashed out to puncture the neat paisley bubble that was turning out to be a very lucrative business. Some of the songs were truly funny in a horrible sort of way. "Concentration Moon," for instance, provided a logical answer to the hippie problem—have the government lock them all up but grant them the freedom to carry out their own fantasies. It is a wistful look back from inside. (p. 90)
The record of Uncle Meat was relatively free of the social commentary found on Freak Out, Absolutely Free, and We're Only in it for the Money. The concept was different…. Basically, it was an instrumental album, but no one, certainly not scholars, debated what Frank Zappa was saying then as they were with the Beatles. (pp. 98-9)
Uncle Meat represented an essentially transitional album away from message-oriented songs towards purer, more "serious" music…. Cruising with Ruben and the Jets [was] a fond look at Fifties' rhythm and blues…. Cruising was neither a parody nor a revival of old rock and roll. The songs—more complex than they sounded—were careful conglomerations of archetypal cliches. (p. 99)
Cruising was an experiment in clichè collages. It used stereotyped motifs of Fifties' rhythm and blues music to recreate the old emotional patterns which Zappa's generation so fondly remembered. The album predated a late Sixties' trend for rock and roll revival. (p. 102)
David Walley, in his No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (copyright © 1972 by David Walley; reprinted by permission of the publisher, E. P. Dutton), Dutton, 1972, 184 p.
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