The Mothers of Invention: Freak Out!

Always ahead of the game, Frank Zappa. If you read The Real Frank Zappa Book, published over 20 years, you'll see him forecasting the end of album sales, to be superseded by digital audio files piped into your home over some kind of network. And for object-fetishists, a scan of the cover art and sleeve notes could be provided. A few years earlier, when CDs were just becoming mass market items, his stuff didn't just get shovelled onto the new format, like Led Zep's, but was remixed from the original masters by FZ himself, and issued on Zappa Records (in the UK). Record Collector in Broomhill was stocked up with several reissues from the Zappa catalogue. I don't know what led me to this one, maybe the cover. Maybe I'd read something about Trouble Every Day.

At the time, I can't have heard anything quite like the first half of Freak Out!, little garage punk or doo-wop. Now it feels easier to spot which elements of the album were "in the air at the time", and which are original. The first half draws on the 1966 sound plus a bit of barbershop and a large dollop of satire. It sounds like the work of what the first song describes as, "Those who aren't afraid to say what's on their minds, the left behinds of the Great Society". And they're not impressed by the standard themes of the day: "Wowie Zowie, baby, love me do / Wowie Zowie, and I'll love you too / Wowie Zowie, baby, I'll be true / I don't even care if your dad's the heat."

The second half is where the ground shifts and things veer off into the territory that FZ made his own. Not immediately, mind, because Trouble Every Day is a righteous protest song that, in its relentlessness if not in the actual lyric, has a little of It's All Right, Ma about it. But that leads to the final 21 or so minutes, where a piece dedicated to Elvis Presley has three segments, the middle of which is titled In Memoriam, Edgar Varèse. It's clear that these are musicians who, as the sleeve notes, put it, "just couldn't get turned on playing Louie Louie all night."

Did I mention this is my favourite Zappa album. Probably because it's the most accessible. Even Lucy, hearing it from the bathroom, commented favourably.

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Comments

[M.J. Nicholls]

Brilliant album.

[David]

Isn't it? Coincidentally they played Help, I'm a Rock on the Freak Zone the same day I wrote this. I only just heard it (via BBC iPlayer), but it sounded especially good coming out of the radio.