Classic Album
Zappa – Joe’s Garage
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. Look, the guy had an enviable moustache -thingie going and it was kinda cool that they’d named a flammable liqueur after him (Okay I’d assumed it was named after him, and I was a kid okay – Zappa Sambuca was The Shit; more importantly, chicks loved seeing it drop down your gullet all saccharine fire), but he did look a bit like Weird Al Yankovic, which kinda sucked. 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 - Hot Rats] should have been uncool – 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 song a-proper. A funny tune about some Eskimo kid taking revenge on a seal hunter [Don't Eat The Yellow Snow - 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 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 4-metre high bust of the man overlooks a park somewhere in post-Communist Lithuania. Following Zappa’s death in 1993, American vice president Al Gore (of An Inconvenient Truth fame) sent a letter of commiseration to his wife Gail. Quite the hullabaloo for a man most remember as a 70′s Rock musician who wrote funny and crude novelty songs.
Sculpting around 70 albums over the course of a 28-year career, Zappa’s music is inexhaustibly diverse, and unmatched for sheer originality. Informed by a wacky palette ranging from 50′s Doo-Wop and Rhythm & Blues to the avant-garde experiments of composers like Stravinsky and Varese’, Zappa concocted a heterogeneous signature that is instantly recognisable 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 intrinsic 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 Joe’s Garage teems with wonder – From the impossible time-signatures of Keep it Greasy to the off-kilter Rock splendour of Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?; from mutant Funk and Venusian Jazz to the melancholic, grandiose eloquence of guitar solos on He Used To Cut The Grass; On the Bus and Watermelon In Easter Hay (the latter one of the most affecting pieces ever executed on six strings).
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.
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