What's funny about that innovative property of the album, though, is that it ends up as an innovative album not only despite there being large stretches of the album that aren't innovative in and of themselves, but also arguably because large stretches of the album aren't innovative in and of themselves. You see, as detractors of the album are often only too eager to point out, the majority of the first LP (I guess I should mention that this was a double album, the second one in rock, even though it's only about 60 minutes long) is filled with a mix of "regular" 60's pop-rock and a whole lot of doo-wop. Of course, "regular" isn't exactly the right word to use; there is an unbelievable amount of satire and parody and plain ole vitriol to be found in these tracks, the kind that wasn't common back then. The doo-wop songs have absolutely no optimism in them whatsoever, and that should be obvious (even without giving the tracks a serious listen) just from the titles. What kind of self-respecting doo-wop band would release songs with titles like I Ain't Got No Heart, Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder, How Could I Be Such a Fool and You Didn't Try to Call Me? The 60's pop-rock pastiches that make up much of the rest are just as jabbing; Motherly Love is proto-cock-rock at its deliberately dumbest (well, sorta), Wowie Zowie is an interesting pop song with hilariously dumb lyrics, and Any Way the Wind Blows is a fantastic "typical" 60's pop song that would actually have serious commercial potential in the hands of a different band (who would probably do the vocal arrangement more straight-laced, naturally).

Still, for an album with the title Freak Out!, it might seem only natural to expect something a little more "extreme" than a bunch of slightly tweaked doo-wop and 60's-pop songs, and on a surface level, that seems a reasonable statement. In my view, though, this belief overlooks one of the primary innovations of this album, which is definitely found in these songs as much as anything else; the concept of deliberately messing with the listener. Zappa knows that all those songs aren't the kind of huge stylistic left-turns one would expect after reading the liner notes, and in fact he explicitly clues the audience into this fact by ending this stretch with a song called You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here. After starting the album with such a deep-hitting counter-culture anthem as Hungry Freaks, Daddy (one of the best social protest anthems ever, as far as I'm concerned, even if it's not even the best social protest anthem on the album), and early on assaulting the listener with the hyper-low-pitched grumbling, hilariously lethargic Who Are the Brain Police (a song that instrumentally almost sounds as if it were recorded twice as fast and then played back at its current pace, and which has hilariously off-pitched dirgey vocals and which breaks into a really disturbing freak out in the middle), the idea of making nine of the album's first eleven tracks pop and doo-wop, tweaked as they may be, is utterly absurd and incongruous with the supposed album concept, and that's the point. Zappa is playing his audience, batting it around like a cat with a ball of yarn, until he feels the joke has gone on long enough, at which point he immediately switches gears and veers off back to the "main attraction."

The first stop is Trouble Every Day, a "blues-rocker" that is indeed the best song on the album and an even better social protest anthem than HF,D. Structurally, it's much more direct than the kinds of things Zappa would do for social protest in the future, but in this case that's really for the best, because it's the lyrics and delivery that matter most here, and the blues-rock background absolutely rips in terms of giving these lyrics the extra power they deserve. Zappa doesn't so much sing as he orates with a couple of pitch changes here and there, declaring at a rapid pace that, in essence, he's disgusted with society and the way people treat each other and how moronically they act. More relevant to the album itself, the implication is also that he's disgusted with the (in many ways) "trite" music culture of the day that stood by and was complicit with all of the other negative forces in society in that they helped lull people into a mindless stupor that would make listeners more willing to sit back and passively accept things (parallels can clearly be seen in the later Third Reich and Roll by The Residents, though in that case the response is just to cleverly mock pop music instead of to attempt to completely redo the music culture). Clearly, Zappa is postulating that if music is going to be able to snap out of this state and act against negative forces, it essentially needs to start over and reform as something as different from present music as possible.

For better or for worse, the solution he proposes makes up the rest of the album (the second LP of the original release). Help, I'm a Rock is a rhythmic jam that largely consists of chanting the title repeatedly while all sorts of sounds get built up around it, It Can't Happen Here is a bunch of a capella muttering and "singing" of whatever, and Return of the Son of Monster Magnet takes the "sound collage" concept to a hilarious level. The funniest part, in my ears, is at the beginning of Monster Magnet when Frank addresses his made-up female 'heroine' (well, actually, she's just a recurring character that would later appear on a lot of Zappa albums, but whatever) in the guise of her conscience and asks her, "What's got into you," but that's really just one amusing bit of many. Is the whole thing overlong and ridiculous? Of course. If these tracks were released as a stand-alone album, the truth is I probably wouldn't have the slightest idea what to make of them, and it's entirely possible that I would (to my detriment) just try to completely ignore it. But the thing that matters (to me, anyway) is that this jam/collage is the logical conclusion to the question implicitly postulated in the first part of the album. Frank's solution to the "problem" of pop music is musique concrete, and whether or not that's a "good" answer (I think it's kinda silly, to be honest) seems largely irrelevant to me. The fact that somebody even bothered to ask a question like this, produce an answer, and then release it to the general public is flat-out amazing to me, and that's where I find the greatness of Freak Out!.

In short, Freak Out! strikes me, overall, as one of the smartest albums Frank ever made in his long, long career. Yes, there are plenty of individual moments (heck, there are long stretches) where, taken on their own, it doesn't seem like this should be considered an incredibly great album, but taken as a whole, this album is a shiny jewel. A shiny, sarcastic, orgasm-noise-making jewel.

The album is divded into two "underground oratorios:" one, called "Absolutely Free," mostly consists of Zappa singing about the life and culture of vegetables (though proceeded by Plastic People, which goes more with the second suite), and one called "The M.O.I. American Pageant," about the life and culture of the average yokel American. The general implication, of course, is that the average American is just like a vegetable, which naturally can be taken as some sort of biting general social critique. This concept of a vegetable/American parallel is a good idea, but the problem I have with it is that (in my observation at least, maybe I'm missing a whole bunch of subtext in it) Frank doesn't really bother to expound in detail on this idea. In my mind, a conversation on this topic between myself and Zappa on this album would go roughly like this:

Me: "So what exactly is the point of the vegetable suite?"

FZ: "Well, it's obvious that I'm saying that the average American isn't that much different from a vegetable."

Me: "Hmm, that's interesting. I think I have a vague notion of the kinds of direct comparisons that could be made as examples of your claim, but it would be nice if I could have a clearer idea of what you mean by that. Can you go into further detail about this comparison?"

FZ: "Uh ..... Chunga, Chunga, Chunga, Chunga!!"

The thing is, on Freak Out!, there was a kind of "thematic crescendo," which not only gave a neat tension as Frank went on and on before reaching the punchline, but also gave a chance to clearly (if indirectly) delineate what it was he was trying to say. Here, though, by throwing the vegetable suite at us without much of a warning/introduction, it's tougher to make sense of it, and given that the "message" of the album is so obviously a central focus point in trying to to enjoy it, this kinda hurts things overall.

Not that I don't basically enjoy the suite, of course. The Duke of Prunes suite is a goofy, yet lovely, pseudo-romantic melody crossed with weird, jazzy guitar rock and with a strange dissonant modern-classical/jazz/random-chatter/whatever break in the middle (Amnesia Vivace), and the Call Any Vegetable suite goes from a jazzy yell-fest into a lengthy instrumental break (Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin), before "resolving" (I guess) itself in Soft-Cell Conclusion. Invocation & Ritual Dance etc might not seem extremely whacked today, but I have to suspect that crossing jazzy saxaphone and guitar soloing with 60's go-go rhythms wasn't commonplace back in '67, and this innovation and sense of novelty adds to the enjoyment I already feel towards the piece. So yeah, the suite is basically ok; I wouldn't mind hearing it one more time, I mean.

The second suite is more interesting to my ears, probably because I can understand rips against average Americans better than doing so using prune metaphors. The album opener (which, again, I consider a part of the second suite, if only as a prelude), Plastic People, has one of the greatest introductions to any album ever, and proceeds to alternate a great verse "melody" with a bunch of chatter to terrific effect. America Drinks is a nice lounge-jazzy piece (with stupid vocal asides like "Wanna buy some pencils?") whose opening "Dah doo doo doo doo doo doo doo Dah doo ..." is done in the best "deeeuhrr, I'm an average American idiot" voice I could imagine (it's also reprised at album's end, as America Drinks and Goes Home). Status Back, Baby is a jazzy doo-wop piece about a high school socialite who had once been popular but now finds his fifteen minutes of social fame slipping away, and who implicitly (I think, at least this is what I'm reading into it) realizes that he's now worthless because he's losing his popularity. Now this I can understand and enjoy; I like seeing popular people become losers like me.

Uncle Bernie's Farm, then, is just hilarious, as it goes from an awkwardly anthemic (for the better) lampoon of whatever into an UNBELIEVABLY hilarious middle-8 ("We gotta send Sanny Claus back to de Rescue Mission! ...") that's delivered in a way that will send you rolling on the floor if you listen carefully enough. Son of Suzy Creamcheese is a short interlude loosely based on the Louis Louis riff (a theme that Frank would reprise several times in his career, and was already used in Plastic People to even better effect) that could have been a large hit in the hands of somebody else, but here it acts merely as an entertaining prelude to the main showcase of the album.

Brown Shoes Don't Make It sums up so much about Zappa and his world view that listening to it could easily serve as a 7:30 primer on Zappa. It throws jazz-rock and music hall and bluesy call-and-response and old cabaret music and whatever into a single pot, with all sorts of weird vocal effects and sounds and Zappa explicitly saying that the average American male wants to have sex with his daughter when the wife isn't around (!!!). Naturally, when he does the last of these, he does it in the goofiest novelty-tune manner imaginable, at least in the way he sings, "Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup ..." Excessively gross? Oh yeah. But it's brilliant, horrifying as it is.

Overall, then, I find this album much more confusing than its predecessor, which hurts it, but it's an intriguing kind of confusing, which helps offset much of the "damage" from that. Plus, the two bonus tracks that are plopped in between the two oratorios (bonus tracks in the middle, oy), are lots of fun; Big Leg Emma is (I guess) a music-hall/blues cross with more deliberately "dumb" vocals, and Why Don'tcha Do Me Right is growling nonsensical blues-rock that has one of the best grumbling bass tones that I can imagine existing in the 60's. So overall a 12 seems reasonable to me; if you like it a lot more, though, I can understand that, as I vaguely suspect there's a bunch of subtexts within that I'm missing that would make me enjoy this even more than I do.

Well, you know what? I can empathize, and it isn't every day you'll see me sympathizing with Rolling Stone reviewers, because quite a bit of Zappa's output definitely falls into a "hell if I know" category. Like, say, Lumpy Gravy. George Starostin had the ingenious idea to get out of assigning this an actual grade by formally categorizing this as "This is Not Music," and man would it be tempting to do likewise. On, the other hand, there are actually a few stretches on this that are indisputably music, particularly the pieces that bookend the album (a bit of interesting modern classical that starts the album, and an instrumental version of Take Off Your Clothes When You Dance, from Money, to close it), so that doesn't quite seem right either ...

If you haven't listened to this album, try to imagine a seemingly deliberately random collage of modern classical spliced with bizarre conversations, spliced with some noises that would later appear on Money, spliced with whatever. Goodness me, at least the jam/collage that ended Freak Out! usually had a steady rhythm underpinning it; imagine if the jam had lost the few vestiges of cohesion it possessed and was released on its own, and you'll vaguely approach imagining what this album is like.

The thing is, I don't hate it. I mean, there aren't really any individual parts that are unpleasant, and there's never a moment where I go, "That's it, I can't listen to this anymore." Some of the conversations are fairly pogniant in how inane they are (oh man, the "pick up sticks" bit is painful, because I know too many people who would be capable of actually laughing like that after getting onto that topic), and a lot of the classical and jazz bits are certainly fun to listen to for a couple of minutes. Of course, most of them only last a couple of minutes at the very most, after which the album switches to something completely different.

On the other hand, even though I don't hate it, and like several individual pieces, I can't say I like this much either. In a certain sense this is dense, but it doesn't strike me as the kind of dense that reveals new interesting things with many repeated listens. I've listened to this way too many times in preparation for this review, and I can definitely say that my appreciation for this hasn't grown with each listen. It's not complicated so much as it's just weird; I'm fairly sure that that was Zappa's intent, of course, to just make the most bizarre splicing of all of his "spare parts" that he could, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have to love what he did (I don't think he meant for people to love this either). It's just ... kinda neat, but not neat enough for me to feel like I'll ever have to listen to this again.

In short, I have no idea how I just wrote five paragraphs (albeit very short paragraphs) about Lumpy Gravy and matters related to it. Buy it cheap for the curiousity, but sell it cheap after a couple of listens; that's all the times you'll need to hear it, if your ears are anything like mine.

Before I start commenting on the concept, just as every single review of this album is seemingly required to do at some point, there's something I want to comment on that I don't think I've ever seen discussed. Today, years after the release of this album, the fact that Zappa despised hippies is just taken for granted, and the reasons he gives for this are certainly very legitimate ones. I have to wonder, though; did hippies back in 1967 and 1968 have any reason to believe that an album like this was imminent from The Mothers of Invention? I can't help but think that the situation was quite the opposite; Zappa had put so much energy into ripping on "conventional" American culture in his first two albums that I would think that many hippies would have thought they'd found a common soulmate. After all, they were rebelling against their parents and elder authority figures (and the culture that had sprung up from them), the same people which Zappa thoroughly condemned in his own unique way. In a certain way, it could have been perceived that Zappa and Flower Power hippies were sort of "brothers in arms," united in their struggle against The Man.

And yet, there's this album, which I suspect was an even greater shock to the hippie community than we today consider it to have been. The question is then this: why would Zappa so thoroughly despise the people and ideologies he condemns on this album, when in theory they had several goals in common with him? The answer, I suspect, was largely tied in with the fact that hippies were making Zappa and his own fervent desire to bring down the establishment look bad by association. It's the same sort of reason why, even though I like a lot of prog rock, I despise getting messages from people insisting that music is supposed to be judged solely on how complex and intricate and difficult-to-play it is. When I'm trying to get people into art-rock and prog-rock, as I have attempted on other pages on this site, I have done so with the intended goal of showing fans of "normal" rock music that they can indeed fit art-rock and prog-rock into their already-existing pallettes, and that you don't have to become a snooty technique whore to enjoy these things. More than any other kind of comment for my site, I get absolutely livid when I read comments of this type, because in those comments is an inadvertant and incidental, but nonetheless very real, attack on my credibility as an art-rock lover among others whom I am trying to convert.

And so it was with Zappa and hippies; he was really trying to effect a change in society as a whole, but while hippies were ostensibly trying to do the same thing, most of them were just a bunch of lazy poseur brats who were merely looking for an excuse to get high and get laid. Zappa had to make it as clear as he could that he did not consider these imposters as people on the same side as him; it was only true eccentrics like him, the "other people" that he refers to in the song Mother People, that were the true revolutionaries, the ones who could actually pull off what it was he intended to accomplish.

Now that that little rant is over, I can get back to the album. The truth is, as much as I like it, I still don't feel like I like it as much I'm "supposed" to. As thorough an assault on hippies (and by extension, all phonies, poseurs and hangers-on) as it is, it kinda feels to me like the concept runs out of steam midway through. I'm still not sure of the purpose of the whispering control-room voice threatening to erase every Zappa album (as cool as it sounds), since it's kinda difficult for me to figure what some sort of commentary related to censorship has to do with the album concept. I'm also not a fan at all of the closing sound collage, The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny; I do think it's amusing that Frank would essentially stick a parody of taking music too seriously onto the end of the album (after asking around, I've found that at least the people I've asked think that the spiel Frank goes off about needing to read "In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka is totally tongue in cheek), but making it almost twice as long as anything else on the album was a bit much. I'm also not a particular fan of Absolutely Free (the second longest track on here), which aside from the lovely piano introduction is alarmingly dull to my ears (echoing voices saying "Flower power sucks!" notwithstanding), and The Idiot Bastard Son doesn't do much for me either.

Now, that might seem like a whole lot of complaining I've given for an album I'm giving a grade as high as 13, and to a large extent I agree; it's extremely tempting to go back to the beginning and change that 13 to a 12. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of parts to this album that I really love, and furthermore there's just some unexplainable power coming out of this album that I can't help but feel beholden to. It also doesn't hurt, for instance, that not only are there a whole lot of melody snippets strewn throughout this album that I find unbelievably great, but that a lot of the lyrics and spoken passages strike my ears as absurdly perfect even after hearing them a zillion times. Do you have any idea how much giddy joy I get from hearing Frank sing, "I'm completely stoned. I'm hippy and I'm trippy; I'm a gypsy on my own. I'll stay a week and get the crabs and take a bus back home. I'm really just a phony but forgive me 'cause I'm stoned?" Or hearing the spoken voice-over in the same song (Who Needs the Peace Corps?) say the following?

"First I'll buy some beads, and then a leather band to go around my head; some feathers and bells and a book of Indian lore. I will ask the Chamber of Commerce how to get to Haight Street, and smoke an awful lot of dope. I will wander around barefoot. I will have a psychadelic gleam in my eye at all times. I will love everyone; I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street. I will sleep ... I will, I will go to a house. That's, that's what I'll do; I will go to a house where there's a rock'n'roll band, 'cause the groups all live together, and I will join a rock'n'roll band. I will be their road manager, and I will stay there with them. And I will get the crabs, but I won't care."

Does it get ANY more perfect than that?

Let's see, after that, there's Concentration Moon, which has 3 melody snippets that I can't regard as anything less than awesome: the "AMERICAN WAY" snippet, the "Don't cry, gotta go bye bye" bit, and of course the main "verse" melody ("Wish I was back in the valley with all of my friends ...'). There's the extremely moving Mom and Dad, where in the span of 2:16 he puts much of the blame for the existence of the hippies that he hates squarely on the shoulders of emotionally negligent parents. As much as many like to go on about how America needs to get back to ways of the 1950's in order to save the moral structure of the country, it should not be ignored that it was in this time that the archetype of the emotionally distant father, who came home from work and just wanted to put his feet up, read his paper, eat his already-made dinner and only have a token amount of involvement in his children's lives, really etched its way into the American consciousness. This was the time when the Pleasantville style of life became the supposed ideal, and you know what? That was the time period and culture that created the conditions for the culture of the 60's to come into being, and was indeed the soil from which phony hippies sprung. This song hits on that observation better than any I've ever come across, and if you don't grit your teeth a bit at the lines, "Ever take a minute just to show a real emotion, in between the moisture cream and velvet facial lotion?" and "It's such a drag to have a plastic Mom and Dad," (an obvious nod to Plastic People; conceptual continuity strikes again!) then we're just not on the same wavelength.

Other major highlights include the hilarious What's The Ugliest Part of Your Body (which then breaks into Frank delivering his message in a straight-up metered superliminal fashion), the AMAZING Hey Joe parody Flower Punk (which ends with two entirely separate monologues done in the usual helium-Zappa phony hippy voice, one in each speaker, each of which are jaw-droppingly dead-on imitations of shallow hippiedom) and of course the gloriously catchy Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance. Yeah, it's only a minute and a half long, and I know it's to be taken as a mockery of hippy world peace anthems, but it's so much fun and so lighthearted in comparison to the rest of the album that I can't help but be happy when it comes on.

There's other good songs, and other great sound effects (the most notable of which is the quasi-"rewinding" of Mother People that takes place during the unfortunately-titled Hot Poop), but I don't really need to go over them at this point. The overall message I want to convey here is that, as (arguably) overhyped as the album might be, and as obnoxious some of its passages might be, Money nonetheless exudes greatness, and has a feeling of being "essential" to any 60's rock collection that I don't think should be ignored. I wouldn't recommend it as a first Zappa purchase, but it definitely should be gotten early on.

So, ok, it's a pretty funny joke on an overall level, but the most important question is whether or not the album itself is enjoyable to listen to. The answer is ... sorta yes. The most important matter along these lines is the fact that the band members (ok, maybe just Frank, I don't actually know how the other people in the group felt about this joke) didn't actually try to create an "enjoyable" (in the proper sense of the word) listening experience with this album (which he refers to, in the liner notes no less, as "an album of greasy love songs and cretin simplicity"). While it is true that Frank grew up largely loving doo-wop, he also loved it despite a perfect awareness of the limitations and ridiculousnesses of the genre, and he sure doesn't try to write around those traits here. Hence, some of the tracks just can't help but be completely unlistenable even after the nature of the joke has been taken into consideration, at least not if you've been weaned primarily on post-50's music.

On the other hand, though, some of the cariactures within these songs are really truly funny, and they help boost this album's rating a long way. Am I the only person who finds the concept of a 50's pop song about "cheap thrills in the back of my car" hilarious? Or who nearly falls over laughing at the sound of Frank's low-pitched backing vocals in Later That Night? Or who can barely contain himself when hearing some of the ridiculous spoken monologues on here? The point is, there are a lot of little points within these songs that manage to give the album much more replay value than it theoretically should have. Heck, the closing number goes out with a completely incongruous (and great) Zappa guitar solo, and that's not something you'll find on most 50's tribute albums.

Still, this is an album where you need the full context of Zappa's early career to properly appreciate it. This isn't a bad album by any means, but when you're building a Mothers of Invention collection, this should definitely be your last stop.

The primary attraction of this show lies in the first half, which includes 14 members of the BBC symphony playing some weird chamber music pieces that have a really bizarre half-improvised play built around them. The summary (every review of this album contains a blurb on this, but it's hard to get around it) given by Zappa in the liner notes is essentially that a civil war breaks out within the group over what the band's direction should be, which causes factions of the group to go in different directions. Three of them leave out of protest over another's desire to play wacky crazy electronic music, and go off to form a "well disciplined" group consisting of themselves and the 14 BBC symphony members ... as robots. Meanwhile, Motorhead wants into the group, but they don't want him because he can't read music, so he proceeds to try and sneak in through other means. Jimmy Carl Black (the Indian of the group) then declares to the others that they'll never get laid playing music like that, and that if they want to get laid they gotta play rock'n'roll music and drink beer. The story goes into weirder territory as the evening goes on, but suffice it to say that some of the other features include Black dressed as Jimi Hendrix and Roy Estrada dressed as the Pope (!!!). I will definitely admit that it hurts quite a bit not to have the visual side of this play easily available (it's included in the Uncle Meat movie, but that's not a very easy find, nor very watchable overall, or so I'm told), and as the lines of dialogue start to thin out and the chamber music itself starts to take over, I do find my attention drifting a bit. Still, it's an extremely funny listen for a couple of runthroughs, even if it doesn't have much replay value beyond that.

The second half, then, is basically a "normal" Mothers of Invention performance, and it's got its ups and downs. I keep listening to King Kong again and again, and after many listens I still can't remember a single bloody thing about it except for the opening twenty seconds. Same goes for pretty much, well, everything in the first portion of the second half (except for the brief Help, I'm a Rock blurb). On the other hand, though, I'm sure not offended by any of it either; I enjoy all of it plenty while it's on, even if I inevitably end up treating it mostly as background noise (and, come to think of it, I remember Pound for a Brown having some pretty terrific guitar passages). The second half of it, then, is a blast, a perfectly segued medley (all instrumental, of course) of Let's Make the Water Turn Black, Harry, You're a Beast and The Orange County Lumber Truck (divided in two parts with Oh No sandwiched between them; these would eventually make their way onto Weasels Ripped My Flesh). The last of these, which closes the show, is an absolute blast of lovely jammy jazziness, built around a simple and pretty theme, with great sax and guitar solos all around. And besides, it actually has a real groove to it; go Jimmy Carl Black!

So that's your archive release. I kinda wish there were real pictures from the play portion in the liner notes instead of all these drawings, since that would help make the first half come to life for me in a better way than it actually does, but that's just a fairly nit-picky complaint. If you're a M.O.I. fan, and especially if you love the jazzier King Kong type of stuff more than I do, you'll want to pick this up very quickly.

As the cover of the album tells the listener, Uncle Meat was "most of the music from the Mother's movie of the same name which we haven't got enough money to finish yet." Now, some bands, when they do a soundtrack, tend to homogenize their sound for that soundtrack, making the songs kinda tie together with some unifying 'theme.' It's ironic, then, that not only is this the first M.O.I. album to not have an underlying theme, but it's also the most hilariously all-over-the-place album they'd ever do. This is the Mothers' "whatchagot stew" album (if you've never read any Patrick McManus, allow me to explain; two hikers are hungry and decide they should stop and eat. One says to the other, "Whatcha wanna eat?" The other responds with, "Whatcha got?" The two of them then proceed to dump the entire contents of their backpacks into a boiling pot of water, making sure to not actually look and see what's going in there - this should only be made and eaten in darkness, you see - and eat the resulting concoction, known as "whatchagot stew."), and for a band as ludicrous as the Mothers, this means some interesting results. Brief bits of Suzy Creamcheeze dialogue are interspersed with great acoustic guitar-driven instrumentals with weird doo-wop with saxaphone-driven Spanishy pop with whatever, with jazzy bits dumped over everything.

Want to know some of what I consider highlights? Well, there's the opening 'title track,' which says a whole lot in two minutes by smooshing together classical and jazz and neat vibe sounds and military rhythms (the later Uncle Meat Variations is also neat, especially when it gets into the goofy area with the high, high-pitched voices singing something about fuzzy dice). There's Nine Types of Industrial Pollution, a six-minute demonstration of Frank's talents at making electric guitar sound like acoustic (or is it acoustic? I can't tell), that never once bores me. There's Dog Breath, In The Year of the Plague (and the later Dog Breath Variations), one of the finest catchy-pop/jazz fusions I could ever imagine (and actually, now that I'm reminded while listening, this is where the fuzzy dice bit first pops up). There's a hilarious live excerpt of Frank playing the chords to Louie, Louie on the giant pipe organ at The Royal Albert Hall (the very thought of this makes me bust out in laughter if I'm not careful), and another of the band doing God Bless America in such a twisted and sloppy and blatantly ironic way that I love it. There's ... well, there's some more stuff I like (even the bits of Creamcheeze banter, and the part where Jimmy Carl Black is complaining about the band never getting gigs, and the part where Ian Underwood explains how he came into the band, which is followed by him wanking on his sax for a good while).

Essentially, I like almost everything on the first disc. There are a few tracks I could easily lop off (The Legend of the Golden Arches and A Pound for a Brown on the Bus come to mind, as they're largely the same track, and I'm not as fond of Cruising for Burgers or Project X as I suspect I should be) without missing them, but overall, the first disc is pretty much great. Unfortunately, plebe that I am, I simply cannot get into the most infamous piece on here, the 18-minute instrumental King Kong, which takes up all the space on disc 2 not occupied by the dialogue and the track sandwiched between them. I like the main theme, and I like the piece in little bits at a time, but I simply cannot hold my attention on it for more than three minutes or so at a time. I know, I know, this is Frank's first major jazz-rock excursion, and a critical linking point in tying the two genres together, so if you're a big jazz fan, there's probably no excuse to not enjoy the hell out of this. But, man, I may like jazzy elements in some of the music I listen to, but it has to be cut heavily with other genres, since I otherwise get bored with it waaaay too easily. Like, say, I do here (though there's a stretch of a couple of minutes during the sixth part of it that are so frenzied that I'm pulled back in, if only momentarily).

So, in all, the album gets docked a bit because I don't like so much straightup jazz as is on here, and I think a good portion of the "normal" material could get cut without much damage to the final product. That said, I still find it very enjoyable overall, even if I probably won't feel any need for a good while to listen to it again.

So what's my problem? My problem is that I have absolutely no idea how to distinguish when I'm listening to what I should probably consider "good" jazz, and when I'm listening to what I should probably consider "bad" jazz. I do know, though, that when I'm listening to the pieces on this album that come closest to "regular" jazz, I start to get really, really bored (much like I do with King Kong, and even that has a cool menacing theme that pops up enough). I listened to these tracks (the 3:04 Little Umbrellas and the 5:15 It Must Be a Camel) a good 15-20 times a piece in the week-and-a-half leading up to this review, and as of this writing, I can barely remember more than five seconds of either one. Neither of them offend me in any way while they're on, and they're perfectly fine, to my ears, as background noise, but that's not really saying much.

I'm also not as thrilled with the main attraction of side 2, the 16:55 of The Gumbo Variations, as I'm sure many many people are. The thing is, as I mentioned in the Uncle Meat review, I like when jazz elements are sprinkled into rock, but this is something else entirely. This is Frank taking what I guess is one of the "fundamental jazz aesthetics," (choose your own better description, please), the idea of having most of a group play a single primary theme over and over while one person in the group solos on and on and on and on and on, and fusing it with rock by (a) making the rhythm section play a rather funky foundation ad infinitum and (b) have almost the entire song dominated by a single multi-instrument solo. Indeed, there's a lengthy saxaphone solo here, a shorter (but not quick either) violin solo, a bit of a guitar solo, and then a bit of a drum solo for crying out loud. Not only that, though, but if you pay close attention, you'll notice that, near the end of the saxaphone solo, the violin starts playing underneath it, and by the time the sax stops, the violin is in full throttle (the same phenomenon occurs with the transition from the violin to the guitar; these smooth transitions allow the soloing to never actually stop, thus making it seem like one continuous solo). Now, don't get me wrong, I do essentially like listening to it; it's awesome to listen to, for instance, if you're driving on Lower Wacker Dr in Chicago on a sunny day. But the solos and the entertainment caused by them during the piece don't stick with me once the piece is over, if you get what I mean. Put another way; the violin solo in The Gumbo Variations may be stunning in terms of speed and virtuousity, but it's the violin solo in The Little House I Used to Live In that sucked me in enough to desperately need to hear it again and again.

So, ok, I'm not overly thrilled with side 2. Side 1, on the other hand, is basically all winners. The opening Peaches En Regalia is a worthy contender for The Greatest Zappa Track Ever, one of the most famous jazz/classical/rock fusions that anybody ever came up with. It's really the closest thing I've ever heard to a symphony that lasts less than four minutes, a piece with so many elements and themes that work not only without negatively affecting one another but that even manage to find a real sense of emotion that was often lacking with his work with the Mothers that it's absolutely mind-boggling. (I have absolutely no idea what the correct way is to split up and punctuate that sentence. Meh.).

Willie the Pimp is up next, and it's a 9:16 wankfest that guest features none other than Captain Beefheart on vocals. Wankfest is meant in a good way here, though; the main feature of this is not the recurring violin theme, nor Beefheart's voice, but instead Zappa ripping out an amazingly non-repetitive guitar solo for a good seven minutes. This guitar solo once made a list of the 100 worst guitar solos of all time, and on a certain level I can actually see the justification for this; to say that it's excessive doesn't quite convey just how excessive it is. On the other hand, while it can certainly become boring as a whole after a while, there isn't actually any moment during it that I can pinpoint as the place where boredom officially sets in, because Frank is doing so many things and playing so many interesting themes that boring ends up seeming like a silly trait to identify it as.

Closing out side one is Son of Mr. Green Genes, an extension of one of the interesting shorter pieces (that for some reason I forgot to namecheck) on Uncle Meat. At first I kinda lumped this in with the other pieces as "just another piece of jazz-fusion," but for whatever reason this one grew on me quite a bit. Maybe it's because, throughout all of the jazz-classical trappings of the piece, the essence of a neat, weird, quirky little tune is always shining through. Whatever; I like it.

So that's Hot Rats as seen by me. I know of quite a few people who rate this as Zappa's best, and all I can say is more power to them. If I had it in me to enjoy jazz more, it's likely I would too. As is, it's still a pretty marvelous album, one no Zappa fan can possibly be without.

On paper, this is, definitely, a really bizarre choice for a favorite Zappa album. It consists of nine tracks, two of which are regular doo-wop (these bookend the album), two of which are :36 each of dissonant interlude and one of which is an "overture" to another piece. The remainder, as far as I'm aware, is a mix of live instrumental improvisations, modern-classical and jazz-fusion outtakes, some of which were (I'm guessing) first recorded live and then taken into the studio. Except for the doo-wop numbers, there are no vocals at all, barring a moment at the end of Little House during the audience applause when there's a mildly tense moment between Zappa and an irritated fan.

In short, then, one might wonder how such a hodge-podge collection could ascend to such a lofty place in terms of my regard for Frank and Co.; indeed, there was a good while after I realized how much I loved the album where I'd start to play it and try to remember what on earth it was that had made me so ga-ga over it in the first place. I mean, the doo-wop tracks (the first, WPLJ, is a cover of a track by The Four Deuces, while the second, Valarie, was apparently a Mothers song) are hardly spectacular, nor do I think they're meant to be; aside from a funny monologue at the end of the former, they would completely pass me by on another album. Same goes for Igor's Boogie (Phase One) and Igor's Boogie (Phase Two); it's very likely that on another album I might even be actively complaining about these two tracks.

But you know what? I don't (in general) review collections of individual tracks; I review albums, and this is a clear case (in my mind) of the distinction between the two. The collection and sequencing of the tracks on this album absolutely amazes me, because Frank accomplishes three significant tasks in doing so (which I will address one by one), all the while throwing in a bonus trait for good measure. The first regards the tension and release thereof throughout; the second regards the symmetry of the album (though actually this is very tied to the first, and could be called trait 1a); the third regards the way Frank creates a "proxy" for the band's overall work. The fourth is that there's actually a strong dose of un-ironic emotion on here, an accomplishment for sure from Frank, but I'll get into that.

First, the tension and release aspect. You will likely recall from my review of Freak Out! that one of the aspects I enjoyed the most about that album was the way Frank played on the innate expectation of a wild, crazy, mind-blowing experience by instead providing a bunch of pop and doo-wop parodies, thus making the later effect of Help, I'm a Rock! et al that much more pronounced. I realized after writing it that that album was very much, in terms of building up to a storm, a sort of studio equivalent of Bob Dylan's Live '66 album, at least in terms of toying with the audience. Well, Frank does a similar thing here, though the actual purpose is slightly different (there isn't an 'explicit' message here). The opening combination of WPLJ and Igor's Boogie 1 works well along these lines, making the listener wonder why on earth Frank would put two tracks like that immediately together, and Overture to a Holiday in Berlin ups the ante by featuring a "romantic" theme that happens to have some of the instruments way, waaaaay flat. Theme From Burnt Weeny Sandwich (a very pleasant, hypnotic instrumental that mostly stars Zappa and his wah-wah pedal) acts as a pleasant "diversion" (one that just happens to really really rule, heh), before Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown manages to "correct" the partial flatness of Overture in one of its parts (its many parts add up to one of the loveliest modern-classical/jazz instrumentals I can imagine; the last half of it features more of Zappa's guitar skills at their most hypnotic), thus releasing the tension that came specifically from that part earlier on.

But of course, that doesn't relieve all of the tension of the first side, and the very beginning of side two's The Little House I Used to Live In piles its own lump of tension into the pile as well. It's soooo intricate and so full of different moods and great melodies, even just within the first five minutes or so (which begins with a couple of minutes of piano improv), as it builds into a multi-instrumental extravaganza, then lets Frank's guitar take over for a bit ... and then we get it. I cannot stress enough how much I absolutely love the violin solo that then proceeds to own something like the next ten minutes of the track (it disappears for a little bit in favor of some piano, but let's not be picky). My preferred analogy to describe how I hear it is to say that it's as if the first half of the album has been placed upon on a sacrificial altar, and the violin solo is the soundtrack to the ritual act itself, but even then I'm not sure I'm accurately conveying my thoughts on it. It's just ... it's just unbelievable. It creates some tension as it goes along, yes, but it also (in my mind, anyway) manages to wipe away a huge chunk of its own tension and the remaining tension from the first side, which (along with being absolutely awesome on its own) is enough to make me adore it.

The piece goes on a bit more after the solo is done, dissolving a good 95% of the remaining tension, calling up some of the themes from side one for good measure (more later), and then ends to a thundering burst of applause. Then it's off to Valarie, and we're done. Which brings me to point two, the symmetry of the album. Let's see, the album starts and ends with a doo-wop member. Theme From Burnt Weeny Sandwich is immediately proceeded by Igor's Boogie (One) and Overture to a Holiday in Berlin, and immediately followed by Igor's Boogie (Two) and Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown. Side one ends with an extremely beautiful piano-and-harpsichord based instrumental in Aybe Sea (heh), then side two begins with a minute of piano improvisations. Ooh, and don't forget about the very end of Little House featuring not only a return to the same organ-driven instrumental texture as the start of the track, but which also quotes Aybe Sea in parts! Hell, there's probably more of these things that I'm forgetting about, and what's here is already impressive.

Part three regards the way Zappa manages to make the album so representative of The Mothers' career despite theoretically not doing so. He manages to bring in the doo-wop/sarcastic pop side, the occasional dissonance-for-its-own-sake side, the nods-to-jazz side, the genre-fusion side, the wow-that's-intricate-stuff side, and even the cultural-war side ("Take that uniform off!" "Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself."). To a large degree, one could argue that the whole gist of the band's career is summed up by those characteristics; it misses out on a lot of the finer details, of course, but for an album with only nine tracks, hitting that much of the band's essence is pretty impressive.

And, finally, there's an aspect here that is not routinely found in other Zappa albums, and that is actual emotional resonance (as opposed to mockery of resonance, which is the closest thing to it that was usually achieved in the other albums). There is unironic beauty to be found in tracks like Holiday in Berlin, Aybe Sea and Little House, and from a man like Zappa, who seemingly devoted most of his life to mocking beauty, that is truly something to behold.

So that's a good start to summarizing why I like this album so much, more than any other Zappa I've heard, and enough to put it in my overall top 50. I enjoy it to pieces, and it works on so many intellectual levels at the same time that I can't help but also feel wonder at its overall construction. A Zappa collection without this (and it can exist, because it doesn't get publicized as much as many of his other albums do) is really missing the heart and soul of the man.

Fortunately, I came around to the first half a bit in the end. A BIT, mind you; I still can't shake the sneaky suspicion that people who worship music like this will worship anything that's sufficiently atonal as long as the texture is right (which, frankly, bugs me just as much as people who automatically put prog rock above "normal" rock), and I've long had an instinctive aversion to anything where I've felt like my respect for the object is supposed to occur as an automatic function of the existence of the object. On the other hand, though, there's quite a bit I've been able to fish out of the first half as "quality" material, even in the most abrasive tracks. I've come to love the driving, rhythmic atonal jamming that kicks off the opening Didja Get Any Onya?, for instance; I can definitely feel the common source material with much of later King Crimson within these sounds. Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask actually does about as good of a job of living up to its title as one could expect, as the various odd vocals certainly remind me of somebody wilting off into unconsciousness through a gas mask, which seems to be pumping aphrodisiacs, laughing gas and ether all at once (and I almost wonder; did Monty Python get their idea for knights who say "NEE!" from the "nee" noises on here?) Plus, it features the sound of what I can only describe as a hungry dog trying to eat the mic, so that's something.

Toads of the Short Forest is also rather neat, starting off relatively pleasant before entering a lengthy instrumental passage that features all the instruments playing different time signatures, except for the alto sax which, as Frank points out, "is blowing his nose." Throw in the blues/porno-music cross (I can't help it, that's what the wah-wah's here make me think of) of Get a Little, and a cover of Directly From My Heart to You by Little Richard (featuring marvelously moody violin work from Don "Sugar Cane" Harris, making this the third straight album where he's had a brief starring role), and the first half actually ends up as fairly intriguing. On the whole, that is; far too many moments make me want to be anywhere else when I'm listening to them, but instrumental and stylistic schizophrenia is always a good way to win points with me in aggregate.

The second half is much more "normal," though it's bookended by more rough material. The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue never really picks up steam, if you ask me; it starts off mildly pleasant, but quickly morphs into another "free jazz" romp that doesn't even really have the gritty texture that made me like parts of Didja. The title track, at the other end, is essentially a minute-and-a-half of noise (followed by applause), which I guess would have been the ideal way for a Mothers show to close, and is thus a fitting end to the album, but it's not gonna be a keeper on my I-pod once this review is done, if you get me.

The neatest part of the album to my ears, then, is the stretch between those two tracks. Dwarf Nebula Processional March & Dwarf Nebula (I LOVE these titles) is a bit of a throwaway (one commentator on the Starostin site says that this track invented video game music), but the next three are each wonderful. My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama is a marvelous mix of driving 70's Zappa sleaze rock (or least what he'd eventually start making in the 70's) that also has a wonderous mid-section consisting of blotches of synths, sax, acoustic guitar that fits in with the rest of the song in much the same way that, say, the mid-section of Monkey Man fits in with the rest of the track. Oh No (shown in a longer, instrumental version on Ahead of Our Time) is a great Money throwback, a direct answer to all of the songs that said "All You Need is Love" (uh, I wonder who that could be), and when it suddenly cuts into The Orange County Lumber Truck, which I've loved since hearing it on Ahead, I'm almost willing to forgive everything that had annoyed me about the album up to that point. That said, I wish each of these three tracks were longer, but oh well.

So the question at hand is, given all my thoughts here, what rating I should give this album. I actually bounced around in a range between a low 7/10 and a high 8/10 (that's quite a bit of distance there), because I'm not sure how to resolve all my conflicting feelings about the album. In the plus column, the album effectively showcases a sound that no other band had, throwing in a small number of tracks I really really like, and overall has a lot of odd diversity that needs to be given due credit. In the minus column, well, I don't particularly enjoy listening to several stretches of it. In the end, I'm kinda leaning more to the good side, because I do think it's a very worthwhile album. But man, this is not for the uninitiated. Proceed with caution.

The thing that really jumps out at me about the album isn't so much the lineup, though, but rather that this seems like the first "lightweight" album Frank released in his career. It doesn't have a central "message" or any conceptual value (even Cruising had a "point" in Frank's overall scheme), it's not groundbreaking in the least, and extremely impressive displays of skill (like the best stuff on Sandwich) are nowhere to be found. A significant portion of the album is instrumental, as usual, but those tracks don't sound or feel as essential as, say, the best stuff on Hot Rats. And as for the sung tracks, well, Zappa didn't really seem to have any real ambition other than to sound kinda macho and dumb, and while that's pulled off fairly well, this hardly seems like a worthy goal of somebody who'd led the Mothers to such interesting heights in recent years.

That said, I'm hardly opposed in principle to a lightweight Zappa album; it at least guarantees that there won't be any hard-to-listen-to moments like the most abrasive passages on Weasels. Of course, the instrumental tracks aren't always that interesting either; The Nancy and Mary Music, for instance, spends way too much time staying away from decent jazzy guitar noodling and hitting us with an overlong drum solo (though this is somewhat redeemed by an amusing "scat vocal percussion" solo near the end), and the title track, while basically pleasant, is also basically directionless to my ears. On the other hand, though, the opening Transylvania Boogie entertains me completely, full of sharp, angry guitar tones in the first half (with lots of complicated jazzy rhythms) and equally piercing tones (with a bluesy rhythm) in the second (the guitar passages themselves are awesome throughout the track as well). Twenty Small Cigars gives a nice (if brief) dose of jazzy guitar and harpsichord interplay, and The Clap is, of all things, a parody of a drum solo (bashing around on a wood block over regular drums). In total, then, the instrumental tracks, while not amazing overall, are definitely worth some listens.

The vocal tracks, similarly, range between kinda weak and an awful lot of fun. The best of these is the ridiculously over-the-top macho blues-rock of Tell Me You Love Me, featuring Zappa playing porno-wah over a mid-tempo stomping Sabbath-quality riff while Flo and Eddie scream their heads off (with an occasional foray into silly falsetto "'Cos I gotta make love with you" lines). The disturbingly catchy Would You Go All the Way? (which, unfortunately, seems to be about US servicemen seeking out sexual pleasure with USO women) and closing Sharleena (a sorta doowop and R'n'B cross) also work pretty well (and Sharleena has a pretty unexpected melody twist in the middle), even if they could probably do with some better vocals. On the minus side, Road Ladies is just a bit too predictable of an organy soul-blues tune about groupies for my tastes, and Rudy Wants to Buy You a Drink (about the musician's trade unions) just doesn't work for me on either on a song or humor level.

So that's the first album that clearly marks the "post-Mothers" area of Zappa's career, and while I can see why he started to lose fans with this, it's nothing close to a terrible transition. It's hardly essential, but if you really fancy yourself as a Zappa historian, you should definitely pick it up. Unlike, say, the next album.

On the plus side, when the band actually gets its act together and plays some real music, they sound fine. The opening runthrough of an excerpt from Little House I Used to Live In is perfectly decent, the sadly faded out (just as it's really picking up steam) version of Willie The Pimp sounds like it has the potential to rip down the house, and Peaches en Regalia (with Flo and Eddie doing a nice job of replacing the horns at one point) is a fine choice for the encore. And while they don't show very good vocal harmonies in it, the closing r'n'b pop of Tears Began to Fall leaves a nice taste in my mouth, though the net effect is like taking a single Tic-tac after siphoning ten gallons of gas with my mouth.

The only other thing I'd like to say (besides the expected warning to stay far away from this) is that I discovered in the process of listening to this album for reviewing purposes that I'd actually heard this album long ago, without knowing it, in a most unexpected circumstance. Back in Fall 1995, in my sophomore year at IMSA, I was in a Sophomore Physics study group with a classmate named Jeremiah Gregg. While in his room one evening working on some homework, with him playing something weird in the background, I suddenly heard this guy screaming out, "BUT HE'S GOTTA HAVE A DICK, AND HE'S GOTTA HAVE A DICK THAT'S A MONSTER!!!" I asked him, "Dude, are these guys gay?" His response was, "Does it matter?" I mumbled, "Well, no, but ..." I think I was supposed to have an epiphany then or something. Oh well.

I'm not completely sure what this album says about Zappa's abilities in the realm of modern classical, whether he really had a legitimate talent in it or not (of course, BWS suggests he did in fact have talent in it, but I'm only considering this album for now in regards to this question). The reason for this is that the snippets of modern classical strewn all over this album (and not especially grouped together at any point) are for the most part so short and undeveloped that they're almost never given a chance to rise above the level of background noise. The main theme of the closing Strictly Genteel is kinda pretty and even majestic in its own way, but it's difficult for me to think of many other passages that could be described the same way on here. And guess what, when the avant-garde classical aspect is as dominant as it is here, it's hard for such non-descriptiveness to not have a negative effect on my perception of the album, even if the individual passages don't tend to be actively offensive or anything.

The songs and skits, however, do tend to be actively offensive. They're so awkwardly and pointlessly offensive and sexist (I mean, at least the later Joe's Garage showed some real creative spunk in its offensive sexism) that I really have trouble imagining the kind of person who would actually find the majority of this enjoyable. There are some neat bits, I'll admit; for instance, it's amusing when Jimmy Carl Black sings in the guise of a cowboy. I also think the endlessly repeated chorus to What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning, with some well-placed falsetto vocals, is a terrific little piece of bubblegum parody, and the skit (Dental Hygiene Dillemma) where a band member is being coaxed by the voices in his head to run away from Zappa's stupid comedy skit ensemble to do serious music is kind of a riot (especially since I too would be in favor of somebody running far away from the band that did this album). But the rest of the tracks are just so stupid and unenjoyable that I can't even be bothered to namecheck them.

Frankly, it's no wonder to me that this was out of print for so long. It's hilarious that this is one of the most expensive items in the Zappa catalogue, and were it not for the fact that I was able to get it for about $2 courtesy of a certain online Russian site, I would be pretty furious right now. As is, all I can say is that I hope you have the sense to avoid buying this, and to not make direct eye-contact with anybody who thinks this is a worthwhile listen. It's not.

The first side, however, keeps giving me some light chuckles with each listen, even if plotwise it's rather stupid (the plot can be found in many places on the web, but for the purpose of adding some length to this review, I will re-tell it). Billy the Mountain tells the tale of a mountain (named Billy, naturally) with a tree (named Ethell, who is his wife, I guess) growing out the side of him. Over the years, Billy had appeared on thousands of postcards, and finally, one day, his royalties check comes in the mail, making him rich. Billy and Ethell decide to uproot and go on a vacation to New York, and in the process of trekking across the country they accidentally keep destroying residential spaces and military air bases. To save the country, the government trumps up charges against Ethell of being a communist and a witch, and drafts Billy into the military. The would-be hero, Studebaker Hoch, who is sent to deliver this order to Billy (and who is able to fly into the air to speak "face to face" with Billy by a means involving flies and maple syrup), ends up getting seriously hurt when Billy laughs at him (Billy has a cliff for a jaw, you see). The ending moral, of course, is that, "A mountain is something you don't want to f*&k with."

Yup, this is stupid, and yet it has a certain "suck you in" quality to it that much of the other Flo and Eddie material simply lacks. Some people don't like the way that it so deliberately namechecks so many icons and places of contemporary (circa 1972) American culture, saying that this aspect severely dates it (especially since the references tend to focus mostly on, you guessed it, L.A.), but I don't think these references date the piece anymore than all of the cultural references found in 40's and 50's Warner Bros. cartoons date those pieces. They're not the focus, they're just a nice extra layer that somehow makes the whole thing at least kinda tasty. At least, I think so.

All in all, then, this isn't exactly an album I'd recommend hunting night and day for, but the first half is intriguing in its own perverse way, so you could certainly afford to grab it if you're a real Zappa-phile and you see it used. This incarnation of the band did a lot worse, after all (and thank goodness, this was the last Flo and Eddie album. Huzzah).

The majority of the album is occupied by the opening sidelong, The Big Swifty, and the closing title-track, both of which are instrumentals with a small amount of neat, obviously "composed" sections, (worthy successors to Peaches in Regalia), and an awful lot of rambling jamming. The opening of TBS is a great set of aggressive, complicated guitar-and-trumpets call-and-response and other neat things, but eventually it settles into a long, long collection of trumpet and guitar meanderings that I can enjoy as pleasant background music but little more (there is a brief passage where Frank tears, though). The title track is better to my ears, with some pleasantly moody bits (especially in the beginning, courtesy of the brass) and a totally unexpected synth solo that any prog keyboardist would have been proud to write (and perform, despite it having no "show off" aspects). And hey, there's a decent guitar passage in there that hooks my interest for a while too. Of course, my brain can't hold off from shutting down forever while listening to this, and I forget what was neat about it almost as soon as the track stops, but it's a nice enough listen while on.

The second side also contains a pair of short "normal" songs, featuring the kind of bizarre genre-bending that I tend to prefer from Frank anyway. Not that these are among his very best; from a theoretical perspective, the big-band jazz-blues of Big Mouth would be kinda neat, but there's something about the way it comes together (maybe it's just the vocals, I dunno) that irritates the hell out of me. It Just Might be a One-Shot Deal is a good deal more interesting, though, and has the extremely pleasant surprise of a gorgeous pedal steel solo popping up in the middle. The rest of the song is kinda non-descript, but that solo makes it all worth it, man.

It's tough, in the end, for me to know what rating to give this. On the one hand, I don't even remotely hate this album, even when it gets relatively boring to my ears; the musicmanship is fantastic, and there are some simply blistering moments that I just can't deny. On the other hand, though, this kind of jazz-fusion is simply not my cup of tea, and given the fact that I listened to this album way, way too many times in an attempt to find more to say and more to like, it's tough for me to give this higher than a 7(10). If you love fusion, you'll probably at least like this a lot; if you don't, there's a good chance you won't.

Lessee, For Calvin (And His Next Two Hitch-Hikers) can't hold my interest for more than ten seconds at a time, Eat That Question loses me soon after it gets away from its cool main riff, and the closing Blessed Relief ... well, ok, that one's actually quite pretty. I keep feeling every so often like it's going to break into the theme of some 70's TV drama, and it threatens from time to time to get boring, but there's some really lovely electric piano and guitar meanderings that save it whenever it gets close to the edge, so to speak.

Still, the fact is that this album ultimately bores me much more than it thrills me. Yes, it probably took Frank an inordinate amount of time to write and arrange these pieces, and yes, the skill level of his backing band is very high. But so help me, the jazz aesthetic, the ability to "get" jazz the same way I "get" rock and pop and some prog, is something that keeps eluding me. I've listened to this just as many times as Waka, and I still like it less than that one, which I didn't exactly love in the first place. So it gets a 6/10, meaning I don't hate it by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't really like it that much either. And rest assured, it's gonna be a long, long time before I listen to this again.

Zappa's new approach, from an overall theoretical perspective, is really freaking awesome. He takes "regular" rock (and related kinds) music, (seemingly) haphazardly smooshes in a solid dose of funk and whatever other genre strikes his fancy at the moment, writes ridiculously over-the-top entertaining (if not always memorable) melodies, uses all sorts of his old jazz fusion buddies to diversify the instrumentation beyond the standard guitar (which tends to go into some awesome solos at times), bass and drums setup, and sings lyrics that range from totally ridiculous to sharp satirical stabs at seemingly anything. The one major drawback to the new approach is that his lyrics would also, from this point forward, very often focus on the obsession that rock music has with sex, and his method of satirizing this would be to sing about sex in the crudest, bluntest ways imaginable. Strangely, I'm not as bothered when he engages in this kind of sexist pig shtick as I was when, say, he would let Flo and Eddie go off into their more intolerable rants; maybe it's because this kind of humor seems less like immature frat-boy humor and more like over-over-over-the-top attempts to rattle sensibilities on the part of somebody who knew just how to make people feel uncomfortable.

So anyway, there are but seven tracks on here, and only a slight letdown in the last two tracks (which are pretty lengthy) prevents this album from getting a 9/10 or higher. Dinah Mo Mum is an incredibly offensive tale about a guy's attempts to bring a girl to climax, and how he succeeds only after he starts screwing her semi-retarded sister, but while it's tough for me to take an incredible amount of offense at something that's so blatantly tongue-in-cheek lyrically (the clearest indicator is that goofy synth line that pops up every so often after he says the name of the track), I'm very bothered at how uninteresting the piece is from a musical standpoint. I mean, it starts out alright, but once we get to the part in the lyrics concerning the screwings of the sisters, all that's left is a stripped-down generic porno background (which I think is the point, but that doesn't mean I have to like it), and this goes on seemingly forever and a half. Blech. The closing Montana is amusing lyrically ("moving to Montana soon, gonna be a dental floss tycoon"), but while it does have some pretty solid guitar passages, there really isn't that much of a melody to fall back on otherwise, which is a problem given that it's almost seven minutes long. Then again, I've gotta give Frank credit for being able to make the singing of, "YIPPIE AYE O KYE YAY!" in the background repetitively in the last minute or so sound so hilariously anthemic, so the song's not a total loss by any means.

The first five tracks are a total hoot, though. The opening Camarillo Brillo is a surprisingly straight-up country-western/Mexican number, but the lyrics are so ridiculously bizarre that nobody will make the mistake of thinking Frank's gone normal on us. "She had a snake for a pet, and an amulet, and she was breeding a DWARF, but she wasn't done yet" is a standout snippet, and the spoken monologue at the end, "Is that a real poncho ... I mean is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho? Hmmm ... no foolin' ..." is tweaked in just that way that makes me like Zappa so much. I'm the Slime is even better, featuring Zappa singing/speaking lyrics about the corrupting influence of television, doing so in Frank's newfound (courtesy of the whacky fan who'd attacked him on stage) creepily lower-pitched voice. It's not just the lyrics that work here, though; the opening main theme is terrifically funky (and is proceeded by a nice aggressive guitar flourish), the female vocals that sing the "chorus" are fabulous, and the song structure is something that I find really neat. Instead of featuring an alternation of verses and chorus, with an instrumental break in the middle, like most rock songs have, the song is broken down simply into "Instrumental Intro"/"Verses"/"Chorus"/"Instrumental Outro." It may not seem like much to you, but for some reason it strikes me as rather amusing.

Next up is Dirty Love, another piece of funky bliss, this time about sex with a poodle (!!!) and with Frank, from time to time, doing a great imitation of Barry White. Sheesh, what a great goofy song for such a gross topic. And then we have 50/50, with a great over-the-top screaming guest vocal delivery from Ricky Lancelotti, which well complements the over-the-top keyboard, violin and guitar solos. It's not really a "song" so much as it is an enormous wank-off, yes, but it's one heck of an entertaining wank-off. And finally, we have Zomby Woof, which is a bit of a comedown (these incessant rhythm-shifts and weird vocals get a little old after a while), but it's a neat little "spook rock" pastiche, and it rounds out the album well.

Overall, then, this is a nice introduction to "mid-period" Zappa, and actually a good candidate for a first album to buy of his. Get it, especially if you can find it as part of the Apostrophe/Overnite Sensation two-fer disc.

On the other hand, it's surprisingly enjoyable for an album with all of these negatives. The aforementioned instrumental jam, the title track, is a total rock-out treat for me. Jack Bruce of Cream fame co-stars with his bass playing, and while I know that a lot of people are irritated with him on this track for spending so much time in the highest registers of his instrument, I just can't help but love the way his playing interacts with the tight drumming, and this in conjunction with some blistering guitar solos (though not mixed extremely well) adds up to a heck of a headphone experience for me. The closing Stink Foot is also a fun listen for me, even if it doesn't really add much to Frank's legacy from a pure music perspective, as it gets to play off his whole "conceptual continuity" kick, and does throw in a bizarre guitar tone to complement Frank's great blues soloing.

So anyways, I haven't mentioned the reason that this album is most infamous, for better and worse. This is Zappa's parody on the whole concept of rock operas, as this album tells the touching story of an Eskimo named Nanook whose mother told him to never eat the yellow snow, and ... ah, I don't want to tell the story, it's available in billions of places, and it's as dumb and goofy as you'd expect a mock rock opera plot-line from Frank to be. It helped spawn a memorable single that was a large part of this album's success ("Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow!"), and it is just effective enough to be able to hook the listener back in when they start to get especially distracted.

There are also large chunks of, as mentioned before, Frank's obsession with conceptual continuity. In one of the tracks we get the "poncho phrase" from Camarillo Brillo, in another we have reference to the Grand Wazoo, in yet others we have reference to the Mudshark, and in the closer we have references to the Dirty Love poodle and the whole concept of "conceptual continuity" in general. You know, things like this make me realize that, to a large degree, Zappa was just a big dork, but it's hard for me to dislike him for that.

So anyway, that's the album: not amazing by any means (did you notice how few actual songs I mentioned? There's a reason for that), but a basically enjoyable listen. Plus, if nothing else, the playing on this album is freaking marvelous, as this really stands out as one of Zappa's tightest bands. If that's the sort of thing that plays a big role in how you think about music, then rush out and get this.

After the FO! chunk is done, followed by standard runthroughs of Let's Make the Water Turn Black and Harry You're a Beast, we fade into the middle of an extended runthrough of Oh No (called here Oh No, I Don't Believe It), whose main attractive addition to the original is the way Frank and George (I guess it's those two) so strangely sing, *"I I I"* in "I I I just can't believe that you're such a fool." There's great moody guitar work here, too; it's a pity that Weasels couldn't have had a longer Oh No performance on it (btw, the "new" material of this track can be found on Roxy under the title Son of Orange County). But never mind that, because it's onto More Trouble Every Day, a slow blues reinterpretation of the great FO! original. It's tough to say which is better, this or the original; the flurry of words in the original still gives me an incredible rush, but man, there's just so much cynical passionate intensity in this slow version that there are a lot of days where I'd have to give this the nod (and oh man, Zappa playing the blues is just way too incredible). I should note that this track is also found (and in better production values, too) on Roxy and Elsewhere, so you needn't despair about not being able to find this interpretation of the original anywhere if you can't find this album.

The album closes with a couple of minutes of Louie Louie and then, in the first acknowledgement that it's 1974 and not 1969, breaks into a fun rendition of Camarillo Brillo, with an even more emphatic barking of, "and she was breeding a DWARF." And that's it. Not an essential album by any stretch of the imagination, but a nice one nonetheless, and yet another testament to the coolness of the San Francisco Amoeba Music Store.

Of the three "pure" live tracks, two of them (Son of Orange County, a fabulous adaptation and expansion of Oh No with elements of The Orange County Lumber Truck, and More Trouble Every Day, an amazing blues reinterpretation of Trouble Every Day) have already been described in my Unimitigated Audacity review above, so I won't go into much detail on them except to say that they're in better sound quality here than there. The third is mostly a rhythmic comedy skit with a funky background (except for the first minute and a half that actually has George Duke singing as opposed to talking), but unlike such things in the Flo and Eddie years, this one's actually funny, mainly because it has nothing to do with sex (it's about one band member trying to entice George into first smoking a high school diploma and then a college degree in order to get smart and high). It's relative filler on the album, yes, but it's a lot of fun, so I don't really mind.

So that leaves the other seven tracks, the first six of which are AMAZING on the whole. The centerpiece is the four minute Echidna's Arf (Of You), immediately followed by the ten minute Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?, which taken together essentially make up a rock/jazz/funk/neo-classical/WHATEVER symphony that features more interesting melody and rhythmic twists and turns than I could have imagined before ever listening to them. To say that this is complicated is to say nothing, but that's hardly the sole reason I adore this pairing; after all, say, The Grand Wazoo had lots of complicated parts too, and much of that album bores me. Nah, what gets me is the combination of the immaculate precision of the guitars and keyboards and brass and percussion in nailing every single one of these shifts and calls-and-responses, on the one hand, and the sense of hot, sweaty energy that goes into their performances, on the other, which completely removes any sense of this music being played by a soulless machine. Of course, knowing that this was overdubbed kinda spoils the fun a whee bit, but whatever; it's still sheer brilliance from a composition point of view, and it entertains me like mad to boot. Heck, even the extended percussion sections work here!

The other four tracks (again, the fifth will be dealt with later) aren't as great as this pair, but they're still a blast. Penguin in Bondage is introduced by Frank giving a hilarious monologue about S&M equipment (made hilarious not due to the subject matter, but rather because of how he's able to make his subject matter so obvious despite admittedly "circumlocuting" the topic to avoid getting censored), then goes into a jazzy, bluesy, funky piece that blasts, say, Dinah Mo Mum into oblivion. The following Pygmy Twylyte is just two minutes or so, but it features an AWESOME guitar sound over some great rhythm work, so it's nowhere close to filler. Village of the Sun is relatively close to a "normal" song, at least as normal as anything on this album can be, and features a passionate Duke delivery about a place in Palmdale where people raise turkeys and the air is bad. And finally, Cheepnis, which has another hilarious monologue introduction about bad monster movies, has lyrics about, well, bad monster movies, which take the form of a little play about a Giant Poodle Monster over a fun tune with a great "chorus" melody. To say entertaining is to say nothing about this.

So why only a 12? It's because, as well as it conveys the absurdity of Zappa concerts, and as funny as it might have been to see in person, 17 minutes of Be Bop Tango is just way way too much. There are some funny spoken moments, and the concept of having audience members dance on stage to Duke's scat singing is amusing, but 17 minutes??!! I actually liked this track the first time I heard it, but on listen two, the novelty value was exhausted, and my goodwill was gone. Arrrgh, and to think that if he left this off and (maybe) cut out Dummy Up, he could have had a rock solid single live album that would be one of the greatest things I'd have ever heard in my whole life.

Still, this album is a MUST for any Zappa fan, and the most vitally necessary album he'd made (to this point) since the glorious pinnacle of Burnt Weeny Sandwich. Take away the lowest point, and you have as solid of a 14 as one could ask for from the man.

What's really weird about this album is that, for all of its eccentricities (and boy, there are a lot of them), the central core of it is semi-mainstream slick commercialized 70's jazz rock. I get the feeling that Zappa really wanted to satisfy both the "normal" fans who had jumped on board with Overnite Sensation and Apostrophe, on the one hand, and the olden-day instrumental freak-out (pun sorta intended) fans who loved when Frank and co. would start wanking in all directions, and the end result certainly does an adequate job of providing satisfactory elements for both. Honestly, though, it's not done in a way that I find ideal; I find myself longing for a bit more grit in the final product, rather than the technically perfect but rather (in my opinion) soulless sounds and instrumental techniques that dominate. It really comes down to where your music priorities are; if you find yourself judging the quality of music primarily by the technical prowess and compositional "sophistication" involved in making this (in other words, if you're a big fan of King Kong or The Grand Wazoo), or if you instinctively go "yay!" at anything that has a heavy jazz influence (see previous parentheses), you'll probably adore this album. Personally, I like a little more function to go with my form, a little more solid offensive line play to go with my Pro-Bowler wide receivers and running backs, and a little more effort in the melodies than I get here.

But sheesh, I've done nothing but whine in this review so far. Let's change directions and look at the good parts, which are many. The band is the same as on Roxy, and while it's not as flabbergastingly engaging in its tightness as on that semi-live album, it's still the most impressive he'd had to that point (and quite probably his most impressive ever). Frank's guitar techniques have only gotten better, and that says something; his soloing in Andy (a bizarre mix of 70's funk/pre-disco and prog-lite) is almost beautiful, and he gets great leads all over the place on the rest of the album. The rest of the band is similarly fantastic; Inca Roads is probably overlong, but the cool synth, vibe (and of course) guitar breaks save it from being even close to unenjoyable.

Switching gears, Frank's perverse sense of humor is all over the place on this album; it's less concentrated than on, say, Overnite, but it's still omnipresent. Going back to the opening Inca Roads, it does get a little tiring after a while when the vocals riff on weird bits like "guacamolequeenguacamolequeenguacamolequeen..." but for the most part the bizarre call-and-response passages work with the lyrics in a satisfactory way. The first Sofa track doesn't make much sense when you first hear it, but when you hear the closing second part, with Frank and co. singing as bombastically in German as they can while delivering their ludicrously mundane lines (the english translation is, "I'm here and you are my sofa"), the two parts become a laugh riot (I agree with George S. that it would have been more effective to switch the order of the two; having the instrumental close things out as a reprise would have been a perfect capstone).

The album also seriously rocks in places. Can't Afford No Shoes is a great piece of semi-compact riff rock, with lyrics about begging in the streets that are disturbingly fun (I love the way they do the line, "Hey anybody, can you spare a dime? If you're really hurting a nickel would be fine!"). Pojama People (deeeuhr, this isn't thematically similar to Plastic People in the least bit, nope, not at all) is an effective piece of intense, jazzy blues-rock that has low-key power running through it (and yes, low-key bluesy power can rock), and dang if that isn't an awesome guitar solo. And finally, San Berdino does a good job of aping "average" mid-70's rock, mixing redneckiness with the standard Zappa e