FZ THE GUITARIST
It’s all there, in the second track of The Lost Episodes. Hear teenaged Frank Zappa, having recently learned guitar, squeeze out overwrought blues leads to accompany singer Don Van Vliet’s lyrics about being flushed down the toilet like a turd. Twenty years later, Zappa’s guitar playing may have improved by quantum leaps, but his obsession with scat humor persisted. In fact, Zappa’s anal-compulsive nature made it possible for us to enjoy hours of archived guitar solos (collected on Shut Up ‘n’ Play Yer Guitar and Guitar).
Zappa was grounded in the blues. His influences — especially Eddie “Guitar Slim” Jones, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Hubert Sumlin, Slim Harpo, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown — saturate a style as personal as any in the history of rock guitar. It erupts first in the snarling, distorted, and pissed-off riff underneath _Freak Out!’_s “Trouble Comin’ Every Day,” whose devastating rap (“I’m not black, people, but there’s a whole lot of times I wish I could say I’m not white”) sounds as powerful today as it did in the wake of the 1966 Watts riots.
“Nine Types of Industrial Pollution,” colorfully described over the course of six minutes on Uncle Meat (1969), offers the first example of what would become Zappa’s signature solo-guitar style: complex, detailed, and vividly melodic monologues related over a modal vamp. But it was only with the dissolution of the original Mothers that Zappa came to consider himself an instrumental focal point, although “Willie the Pimp,” “Son of Mr. Green Genes,” and “The Gumbo Variations” on Hot Rats were proved that Zappa could handle the attention.
While Zappa’s guitar work originally reflected the blues’ linear expressionism, he eventually came to prefer modified reggae grooves. With bass, drums, and keyboards pulsing fatly behind the beat, a second percussionist (usually Ed Mann or Art Tripp) was free to embellish his solos. Zappa was a quintessential guitar storyteller whose most profound influence was Jimi Hendrix. Zappa tapped into the blues through Hendrix, but you can also hear the electric folk-, jazz-, and acid-rock narratives of guitarists like Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia in his playing, soloists with an equally strong sense of the guitar’s rhythmic and storytelling potential.
Zappa also used guitar solos as the foundation for new compositions. During the late seventies he began to experiment with the process he called xenochrony, which he once illustrated as “the result of two musicians, who were never in the same room at the same time, playing at two different rates in two different moods for two different purposes [and,] when blended together, yield a third result which is musical and synchronizes in a strange way.” Beginning in 1979 with Sheik Yerbouti, and kicking into high gear on Joe’s Garage the same year, Zappa began to extract guitar solos from live performances and reinsert them into studio constructions, transforming them from spontaneous personal expressions into retrofitted compositional elements.
CITIZEN ZAPPA
Set up and busted for producing an audio porn tape in 1962, Zappa subsequently took a lifelong interest in free-speech issues. (He eventually recorded and released his own version of the tape as “The Torture Never Stops” on Zoot Allures.) Like his hero Lenny Bruce, Zappa constantly challenged the boundaries of acceptable artistic “speech.” This entailed constantly raising the bar of propriety, which was a good thing in the abstract but often made for some pretty silly songs, a relatively small sampling of which are collected on the posthumous Have I Offended Someone? (1997). Zappa’s explanation for his witty little diatribes against certain types of gay boys and Catholic girls, Jewish princesses and the French, was that he was simply making sociological observations about the citizenry of the world in which we live. And who’s to say he didn’t believe it himself?
Zappa was nevertheless among the first to man the barricades when Tipper Gore and her fellow “Washington wives” mounted an attack against “offensive” rock lyrics in 1985. His response to the Parents’ Music Resource Center was two-pronged, as it were. Zappa’s witty and commonsensical testimony before the Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee helped undermine a proposed records rating system. And his 1985 album Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention was a perfect example of how sampling could serve as a potent form of political intervention — not to mention having a profound influence on such groups as Negativland and the Emergency Broadcast System. In FZMtMoP’s “Porn Wars,” Zappa took Senator Ernest Hollings’s denunciation of “outrageous filth,” Tipper Gore’s matronly criticism of “fire and chains and other objectionable tools of gratification,” and another senator’s recital of the phrase “bend over and smell my anal vapors” as raw material for a thirteen-minute Osterizing process in which he speeds, slows, and generally mangles their words. These techniques may sound old-hat now, but Zappa employed them in a more musical way than the ensuing generation of preacher samplers have usually managed to do. Zappa samples himself as well, adding snatches from Lumpy Gravy and Thing Fish to the track. At points the music on FZMtMoP sounds wistful, sad, even pitying. How strange it must have been for him to defend music he sometimes pretended not to dig all that much in the first place. As with so much of his work, it has the feeling of too many ideas crammed into too little space and time.
But if “N-Lite” was where Zappa dumped his brain at the end of his life, “Watermelon in Easter Hay,” on Joe’s Garage, was where he let himself dissolve in the absurdity of rock guitar, bands, lyrics, the public, everything. “Who gives a fuck anyway?” he asks with a laugh in the voice of the Central Scrutinizer, who conflates Zappa the band leader, composer, and self-conscious voice of authority in all its manifestations. He answers this question himself in the calm and timeless glory of his ensuing solo. Which is where this hideously condensed overview of Frank Zappa will end. Got your politics right there.
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