Essential & Non-Essential Zappa

Big BONGO FURY fan here

Very dark vibe to that album!
It's got "the spook" in it!

and it rawls hard!

Some amazing guitar solos too
Even an iconic "signature" solo.....Muffin Man

 

Thank you...tryin' to be!

 

I'd guess I have about 80

 

Non-essential : the overdubbed and remixed versions of "In It for The Money" and "Ruben & the Jets"!

It's a shame, because the twofer "Money/Lumpy Gravy" was a good idea (and "Lumpy Gravy" was untouched. I listened to it a LOT).

Other than that...it really depends. The first Zappa album my best friend got "The Lost Episodes" first! I was aware of what it was (posthumous odds and ends release), he wasn't...and he still got into it big time.

 

This

 

Yeah ..some have difficulty with that one.

 

Here's something interesting you can read https://www.avclub.com/can-you-be-a-fan-of-frank-zappa-but-not-his-music-1820520135

 

He likes Zappa's artistic bent.but not the end result.

 

Listening to Sheikh Yerbouti - the consensus is that this one is 'essential' as it occupies such a pivotal position in the Zappa discography - and, my God, there is something on this album to offend just about everyone who wants to be offended! I daresay at the time it was only the dirty words (and Jewish Princess) that upset people - but there's far more to upset people by today's standards.

There is no 'Parental Advisory' sticker on this, or -afaik - any other Zappa album. I'm surprised!

 

The all-instrumental 'Jazz From Hell' was the only one that came with a (real) parental warning sticker.

 

Bobby Brown.
Tbat was a hit,was it not ?

 

Not in the U.S., but big in Europe.

 

Now you are ready for Joe's Garage.

 

Huge in Scandinavia.

The line about rape would get it totally red-carded today.

 

Side 4.........."Wild Love" > "Yo Mama" is one of my favorite Zappa album sides.

 

Yup, it's all about Side 4.

 

The parental advisor stickers started in the 80s in the US, with the PMRC. Zappa started putting his own stickers on with Meets the Mothers of Prevention.

 

I recently watched a bunch of Zappa interviews and found him to be very interesting. I concluded that I'll just have give his stuff another try, and probably pick up a album or two or three of his, but it will have to be something entirely instrumental. The only ones I have and are very familiar with are We're Only In It For The Money, and Apostrophe.

 

I never understood why he wanted to move to Montana to raise dental floss, though. [/joking]

Speaking of Overnite Sensation, I had no idea Tina Turner, of all people, was singing back up on that album's tracks.

 

Yeah ..I met this German chick in the nineties, the only thing she was familiar with Z was BB.

I made a FZ comp tape to a friend ( Unfamiliar with The Mother) ha he thought BB was the singer, had to set him straight.

 

What FZ ~Album title deserves the 45rpm 2LP treatment?

 

Not saying this to be a jerk, but if you're struggling with Hot Rats and Waka-Jawaka, Zappa's probably not your thing.

 

I don't agree with that author's interpretation of the first quote, the one he uses to start the article, and I'm skeptical that he's not getting the second quote wrong. Zappa said something like that second quote on many occasions, but what he always said was, "I create music for people who enjoy the sort of stuff that I do," or "I create music for people who enjoy the same sort of stuff that I do." (The difference being that he's specifying his own activities, his own music in the first case, and his tastes, the music he enjoys as a fan, in the second case.)

I've always noticed variations on the second quote, which again he often uttered, and they've been cemented in my brain, because I'm just the same when it comes to my own music, the music that I create (at least when I'm engaged with my own projects). The idea behind it is to stress that while one acknowledges that one's music is not mainstream, not "normal," and is not going to be for everyone--basically one is not shooting for music that's going to top the Billboard charts, there are other people in the world with similar tastes to oneself, who enjoy the same sorts of things that one does, and thus one is catering to that niche. And they deserve to be catered to, because otherwise no one will be providing them with the sort of stuff that they like the most in their unusualness. In other words, if one tries to cater one's own music to one's relatively unusual muse as much as possible, there are going to be other people, there is going to be at least a "cult" audience, with a more or less similar muse, similar aesthetic preferences, and maybe no one else would be creating just the sort of music they ideally like.

 

Re the article we were just talking about, I also get the impression that (a) the author is very lyrics-oriented, and (b) he doesn't really understand much about the music he's listening to.

For one, it makes his eventual claim that he's not very lyrics-oriented seem indicative of self-denial or a weird lack of self-awareness. A huge percentage of his comments about the albums he checked out is about the lyrics, and even right after he says that he's not that lyrics-oriented, he makes this comment: "Throughout my two hours with it, all Joe’s Garage seemed to want to make me feel was impressed—by Zappa’s skills, sure, but also the balls he has to waste them on something so moronic." The word "moronic" there, which is the punchline of that sentence, is about the lyrics. It's not about the music.

Re (b) above, from one perspective I can empathize with it being problematic to require that people understand at least some basics of music theory, or understand some basics of music on a "technical" level, to engage with music. But on the other hand, (i) I have little sympathy with people not wanting to learn and understand more about stuff they're routinely engaging with and supposedly interested in, (ii) I have even less sympathy for that when it comes to someone who is fashioning themselves as a professional author on the topic, and (iii), there's no way to really understand the obsessive love that big fans have for Zappa without understanding something about music from a theoretical or technical perspective, so that one understands something about just what makes Zappa's music unusual relative to other music from that perspective.

If you put on Joe's Garage and you can't understand, for just one example, at least something on a technical level about "Keep It Greasey's" relation to normal funk and what makes "Keep It Greasey" so unusual and quirky in that regard, even if your understanding is more from an intuitive angle, you're not capable of understanding a lot of the attraction. And those charms have nothing at all to do with lyrics.

 

Joe's Garage is not FZ musical highlite, but as social satire it excelled in its time period.