Frank Zappa - Hot Rats

So I’m guessing that when Frank was working on Captain Beefheart’s magnum opus, Hot Rats was the album that he was working on for himself.

I don’t pretend to know squat about Zappa beyond what I read in his autobiography and what I learned from Sheik Yerbouti. As a friend once told me, “Every town has a big fan of Frank Zappa.” And I’ve discovered that he was right on. So to anyone who knows their shit about Zappa and is reading this, I’d like to apologize for the assumptions here. Feed us the real story in the comments.

It appears that Zappa is really earning his chops as a guitarist here, and Hot Rats displays his notable talents in supreme fashion. You start to hear bits of an individualized tone crop up within the grooves, particularly on the mindblowing solo for “Willy The Pimp.”

There’s a sense of his compositional sense showing fruit on Hot Rats, particularly on “Son Of Mr. Green Genes” where horns, jazzy keys and, yes, more ridiculous guitar solos to make more ridiculous Zappaphiles.

Fair warning, there are clarinets, but the fact that I can appreciate them while otherwise despising that instrument is noteworthy.

It works because everything here has been rehearsed to death, tweaking every performance to ebb and flow to allow listeners the ability to grasp at just how good Zappa was at finding top-notch performers, and then finding more of them when the first ones moved out of the line-up.

About 10 years ago, I started hedging towards the Zappa catalog tentatively, asking friends who seemed to be long in the tooth with his work where to begin. I started throwing out albums that struck me with just their cover art, records that grabbed me visually whenever I came across them in someone else’s collection.

Hot Rats fits that category, and I remember the response that it was an instrumental work caused me to move somewhere else. I wish I hadn’t done that now. There is so much being said within those notes of Hot Rats that it makes a claim for repeated listening, ones where those fortunate enough to be a part of it will find new discoveries and chart the record as a period of great heights for the man.

The drag isn’t that those Zappaphiles were on to something beyond what the rest of us would understand. Instead, it's that we squandered the all of that time we could have been listening right along with them.

From Straight To Bizarre: , Beefheart, Alice Cooper and LA’s Lunatic Fringe

Going back to the first time I ever heard Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, I remember wondering, “What is going on here?”

The second thought immediately following this was “Who on Earth would release this.”

Even today, Trout Mask Replica stands out as a left-field landmark, an impressive opus that may not sound like a masterpiece upon first listen, but its creative seeds begin to plant themselves immediately afterwards causing each subsequent listen to reveal an additional layer of complete brilliance.

So it goes without saying that the record company that had the impossible foresight to allow such a document to grow to fruition must most certainly be run by a special person.

The label was originally called Bizarre and it eventually transformed into Straight records. The men responsible for these forward-looking labels were Frank Zappa and his manager Herb Cohen. Together, they drew up a contract with Warner Brothers for Zappa’s material, and they secured a vanity label with the company so that Frank and Herb could offer artists an outlet for their creativity.

From Straight To Bizarre: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and LA’s Lunatic Fringe chronicles the origins of Zappa and Cohen’s record company all the way to its ultimate collapse amid bad feelings and obligatory lawsuits. It’s recommended to any fan of Zappa or Beefhearts that’s interested in learning more about this very creative time for both of them and the strange business plan that Zappa hatched in turning documents of L.A.’s self-described freaks into recording stars.

What’s striking is how patient Zappa seems to be with these people, some of whom have clear mental issues that far outweigh any attempt at assisting their artistic endeavors. Others are just plain opportunistic, part of the scene because they invited themselves and invented a second-life persona that was either hiding their real history because of how awful it was or how bland it looked on paper.

For some reason not explained on film, (none of the interviews presented in this feature Zappa) Frank felt these enigmatic characters deserved documenting. He began on a quest to transform a paranoid schizophrenic named Wild Man Fischer who spent his days selling his stream-of-questionable-consciousness songs for a dime, essentially panhandling his lunacy for tourists and passer-bys.

For most of us, these characters are minor annoyances on our way to work, but to Frank, Fischer was part of the landscape of this social freak culture he was attempting to document. Fischer thought he’d sound like the Beatles when Frank finished, but when Zappa presented an album with not only Fischer’s primitive compositions, but his crazed existence in the form of field recordings, he got mad.

The Wild Man-true to his name-flung a flower pot too close for comfort at the head of a very young Moon Unit Zappa, trying to process how An Evening With Wild Man Fischer wasn’t as big as Meet The Beatles.

After that event, Fischer was never allowed in the Zappa house again and his debut record has never been re-released to this day because of bad feelings. I verified this online where the lowest priced copy of An Evening With I found on a recent scan of EBay (VG rating) had a starting price of $20 with better quality copies ranging from $50-$100.

The GTO’s get ample screen time on From Straight To Bizarre with Pamela Des Barres and Miss Mercy spouting on about meaningless stories of getting high with the Magic Band and defining what exactly constitutes being a groupie. Out of all of the label’s releases, the GTO’s Permanent Damage may stand as the most unnecessary record ever made, but according to the film, Zappa tolerated their limit talents and unprofessional behavior in the studio.

Thankfully, a great deal of time is spend on Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica and the power that he exerted over the band during this period. It’s clear from Magic Band members John French (Drumbo) and Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo) that the Captain initiated a regime of cultdom that French later referred to as “Masonesque.”

You get the sense that Zappa himself was aware of this treatment, yet gave a wide birth between being concerned with their welfare and allowing his old friend Don Van Vliet to have what he wanted most: total creative freedom. In his defense, Zappa did give the Magic Band a hot meal every so often out of pity.

During the period where they were considered a band, Alice Cooper also maneuvered into a contract with the label based on an audition that Vince Furnier misheard to take place at nine in the morning at the Zappa cabin in Laurel Canyon instead of Frank’s preferred time of nine in the evening.

Frank also caught an Alice Cooper gig that witnessed half the audience leaving in disgust, which meant that Zappa simply had to agree to sign them based on principle alone. By the time of their third album Love It To Death, the band had finally found a new producer who captured their essence into a palatable offering, led by the enormously successful “I’m Eighteen.”

With that record in 1971, the logo of Straight Records was all that was left before the Zappa/Cohen project was phased out of discussion along with Zappa’s own contract with Warners.

I haven’t even touched on signings like the A cappella gospel vocal group The Persuasions, Tim Buckley’s Starsailor release, as well as Mother’s member Jeff Simmons’s solo album. They’re all included in the discussions during From Straight To Bizarre, which makes the film a bit heavy at over two-and-a-half hours in length.

You may get a bit winded by all of the talking heads throughout the feature, helping to assist in the film’s girth and you may get very sick of the original musical music they use each time the conversation focuses on Beefheart. There are samples of some of the label’s artists, but as a matter to save money, the producers must have bargained a lower number to someone familiar with Beefheart’s repertoire to come up with a cheesy facsimile.

Cheap tactics aside, the film does prove to be a good reference point for any up-and-coming Zappa fan looking to see how far his influence extended into the late sixties. It’s also a nice document of one of the most successful avant-garde record companies that ever benefited from a major record label and a reminder of how different the system was when it came to harvesting talent beyond the pool of commercial ambition.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Captain Beefheart - Lick My Decals Off, Baby

There’s no middle ground with Captain Beefheart, so this review is for those who have already taken the big leap into the man’s polarizing body of work and are looking for the next step.

The assumption here is that you started with Trout Mask Replica, the massive document captured by Frank Zappa that’s perceived to be Beefheart’s crowing achievement. That perception is debatable, but I won’t argue its brilliance and I won’t fault anyone who chooses it as their first ride on Beefheart’s off-the-map journey.

It’s the first Beefheart album that captures his off-center compositions, a strange blend of that aforementioned train ride that’s piloted by an engineer under the influence of tainted moonshine and too many Howlin Wolf and Ornette Coleman records.

Trout Mask Replica gets people’s first attention because it had the benefit of the Zappa affiliation. That in itself was a weird form of commercial appeal, but not in the sense that Zappa made the album accessible enough that you’d actually hear the good Captain on the airwaves. His work on the album got people to take notice, in the same way you’d want to go check out Serrano’s Piss Christ because you heard Annie Leibovitz developed the negative.

So let’s assume that you’re like me: you’ve got your Trout Mask Replica record and you’re blown away by it because there is nothing on Earth quite like it and all you know is that you need more of that.

Where do you go next?

The next logical step is to get going forward from Trout Mask Replica, right into the follow-up album, Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This single l.p. offering follows the same pattern as its predecessor, but it features a touch more of the primordial weirdness that completely eliminates the jokester aspects that Zappa tried to display on Replica with false starts and studio novelties.

If Replica was recorded “through a flies’ ear,” then Decals uses legitimate recording technology, with microphones, tape machines and combo amplifiers. It takes the inherit weirdness from its predecessor and streamlines it, packaging the off-kilter arrangements into nice Van Vliet stomps.

It’s that foot in the blues that leads me to think that Beefheart fans can become jazz fans, but not the other away around. He’s an accomplished blues shouter, which makes lines like “She stuck out her thumb, and the fun begun!” so much more authoritative than if it were uttered by Zappa, Alice, and whoever was on the Straight record label at that time.

Beefheart fills Decals with matters of the flesh, saving the smart stuff for those incredible moments of interplay and impossible chord progressions. There’s a chance that listeners not accustomed to this kind of “wrong” playing, but there are real images within those challenging passages. And when the Magic Band breaks into one of their recognizable grooves, you are very aware of how passionate their performances are, regardless of the measure.

And then there’s Vliet himself, who smartly positions political statements in between lines of absurdity. The sarcasm that fills his anti-Aquarius barb “Space-Age Couple” sounds like a prediction of the entire counter-culture crash a full half year before Altamont even took place.

Ironically, Lick My Decals Off, Baby was released during the same month as Altamont, and it died as quickly as Meredith Hunter. It seemed that there were very few people who were still interested into seeing where this strange cat was going after his bulbous double l.p.

But for those who did-and for anyone wanting to see where’s the good Captain’s ship was heading after stirring up the waters, this record is a sturdy vessel to navigate this artist’s weird waters.

It also shows that Vliet’s brilliance was not a fleeting thing. He was by this point a certifiable artistic figure that could shine very consistently-and he did so during future records.

And you didn’t need a “fly’s eye to see it” with Lick My Decals Off, Baby.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

So Long Captain: Don Van Vliet R.I.P.

At first, I was dismayed at the way I learned of Don Van Vliet’s passing.

I learned about it on Facebook.

Some would claim that this is the power of the social network. That your circle of comrades will scour the internets and newswires-feeding back only the news of interest to your social strata.

I felt that the death of Captain Beefheart was deserving of a worthier announcement. It was an announcement that should be broadcasted from the top of Rockefeller Plaza. His passing should be on the bottom screen ticker at Fox News.

“Captain Beefheart, dead at the age of 69…” the closing sentence of Katie Couric’s evening news.

Then it struck me how the news of Van Vliet’s passing came from an update from the very same friend who introduced me to Captain Beefheart.

The same person who brought Captain Beefheart into my life also told me when he left it.

I’m reaching there-searching for clever metaphors that suggest how Captain Beefheart’s music will live on, and all that.

But the truth is I’m not so sure.

How often do you hear Captain Beefheart on the radio? A silly question, but the truth is, I just heard a song on the public radio station last Saturday night.

I got genuinely excited.

Because it’s a rare event, and Beefheart is one of those rare icons that created just for the sake of creating, that you can just imagine from his name that the results did not bode well for radio airplay.

Now that I recall it, my friend wasn’t actually the first time I’d heard Beefheart. The first time was watching him on Saturday Night Live performing “Hot Head.”

I hated it.

But then my friend turned me on to Trout Mask Replica while in college, and an entire world of wrong notes, vividly descriptive wordplay, and the closest thing to Howlin’ Wolf’s voice that I had ever heard, came through a lens of understanding.

From there, Lick My Decals Off, Baby.

From there, Doc At The Radar Station.

And so on.

Discovering Beefheart during a time when he wasn’t even active musically added to the attraction. What happened to him? Where did he go? Was he just another acid casualty?

You’re never forgotten on the internet, and someone put together a comprehensive Beefheart sight that advised everyone that the Captain was now just “Don” and those covers of his late-career material was, in fact, art.

It was good to know that he was doing well with his art.

You also began to get the picture that Don wasn’t doing so well health-wise. Multiple sclerosis. What cruel irony gave a man with such a vast imagination with a disease that devastates cognitive ability?

It prepared you for this day, but it doesn’t soften the blow.

I like how Don’s relationship with Zappa deteriorated when Beef felt that Zappa was painting him and his magic band as a freak show. This was serious stuff to Don, and he didn’t sweeten the mix with accessibility, or have a care in the world how his stuff was going to be marketed.

To be honest, Zappa may have been trying to do the only marketing that would have been possible with Beefheart: promote the zany sounds.

But listen closely and you’ll hear that those wacky chords are very complex. This was not a nut-job working like a monkey for Warner Bros. This was an artist who pulled the unthinkable by landing on a major label and still managed to release some heady, life-changing records that sound just as challenging now as they did when they were released some forty years ago.