Germaine Greer on Frank Zappa

It’s been 40 years since the release of the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, and the BBC4 has taken the opportunity to compile a 27-ish minute (and very Greer-ish) retrospective, more on Zappa than on the record, but whatever. It would have been nice to hear a detailed recollection of the album’s recording process, original board tapes, interviews with Jimmy Carl Black et al, but this piece (mp3) still offers some good insight. We get a reasonably well-edited succession of trivia, including a fawning rememberance from Dweezil where he remembers Frank telling him at an early concert that “those people, they use drugs as an excuse to be assholes,” and a retelling of that old saw about Zappa being trapped by the cops into recording a sex tape during the sessions for Freak Out!, and instead of fighting it in court, spent ten days in prison out of sheer bullheadedness. Like most people, I give up on Zappa after about 1976, when he seemed to devote himself to intricately constructed scatalogical novelty songs and mean-spirited social diatribes without even a whiff of the nuance of his first three records. But there is a fun section about Zappa’s “tortuous relationship with the musicians” who played with him, from orchestras (he’s pretty nasty toward the apparently drunken London Philharmonic) to Steve Vai (yes, that Steve Vai), who cut his teeth playing in the early 80s Zappa incarnation. Zappa would change the entire form of the song live, by gesturing toward his hair for “reggae,” or his crotch for “metal,” sort of like a pan musical version of James Brown (who, I’ve heard, would fine his 1960s lineups during sets by flashing, for instance, five fingers—for five dollars, right—at one of them).

Still, though, I wish someone would put together a whole piece on just Freak Out!, which is still one of the greatest records of the 1960s (and was it the first 2xLP, or was it Blonde on Blonde?). I found it in a used bin at Streetside Records here in Bloomington during my junior year of college, and it gave me much more ammunition than I really needed against the ubiquitous patchouli and bongo crowd I found everywhere. Zappa was rebelling in the only way he knew how against the people who should have been rebelling, and in fact probably used to be rebelling. Dude, he was the original straight-edger, right? On that line of thinking, my favorite song from the record has always been the one that turned its focus inward, but still with tongue in cheek—”I’m Not Satisfied” (mp3). Lyrically, it’s pretty bleak—it stops short of recommending suicide only barely—but it’s the song’s skillful melding of all sorts of musical affectations that makes it so irresistable. There’s the Byrds-ish 12-string simulation during the first verse, British Invasion-level drumming, tinkling saloon piano deep in the background, vaguely (on purpose?) gospel “aaaahhhhaaahhhhh”’s under the bridge, and an overarching nod toward a Latino big-band sound with all of those mariachi horns in there, topped off by that strictly Mothers-invented “yeeeeeeeaaaahhhh.”