Frank Zappa: Hot Rats
In contrast to last week’s album, this was a pleasant surprise. I must say right off that I had never taken very seriously Zappa’s ambition to be taken very seriously as a musician. Maybe “ambition” is the wrong word, since the general air of dadaist clownishness with which he invested his work certainly encouraged one to treat it as a joke. That was my original difficulty. Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were essentially a musical comedy act, and when albums like Lumpy Gravy and Hot Rats came out, people didn’t know what to make of them. I think I heard each of them approximately once. I have a faint memory of hearing them in the company of friends, all of us waiting for the jokes to start, puzzled and bored when they never arrived.
Subsequently I heard Zappa’s music praised often enough, but usually by the sort of people who think songs like “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” are tremendously funny, so that the commendation of the music came across as an unpersuasive afterthought, a bit reminiscent of an old-time Playboy reader praising the magazine’s journalism. Nor did Zappa’s general air of angry cynicism—which seemed, on the basis of occasional media reports, to harden over the years, along with his liking for crudeness and obscenity—suggest that I should reconsider his music. Ryan C., who comments here, was the first to convince me otherwise. He succeeded because he first established that he knows good music from bad.
Even so, I had to play Hot Rats through at least a couple of times before I could stop looking over my shoulder, so to speak, and get the old Zappa associations out of the way enough to hear the music as music. I wasn’t exactly expecting it to break out into satire, but I kept looking for the musical irony, having the expectation that, for instance, the sunny Saturday morning ebullience of “Peaches en Regalia” was not to be taken at face value and would somehow take a pratfall.
But with all that, finally, cleared away, what has emerged is a wonderful album. It’s difficult to categorize or describe. I’ve heard it referred to as fusion (i.e. jazz-rock fusion) and as “fusion for people who hate fusion.” I guess that’s accurate, although I don’t really know that much about fusion. I would describe much of it as a sort of instrumental progressive rock (the only vocals being a few verses of “Willie the Pimp” sung by Captain Beefheart). The description especially fits my favorite tracks, “Peaches” and “Son of Mr. Green Genes,” which seem to be pretty tightly composed and played—that complex doubled flute and guitar line in “Green Genes,” for instance, certainly wasn’t improvised. The six tracks can be grouped into three styles: the aforementioned prog-rock, the blues-rock jams of “Willie the Pimp” and “The Gumbo Variations,” and the most jazzy-sounding tracks, “Little Umbrellas” and “It Must Be a Camel.”
With the one reservation that “The Gumbo Variations” goes on too long (almost seventeen minutes), the album never fails to be interesting. And I don’t mean that it’s cold or empty technique, either; there’s a kind of happy excitement throughout. It’s an odd sensation to have any sort of emotional response to Zappa’s music, and I certainly never thought I’d apply the word “delightful” to any of it. But it comes to mind at many points in this album, especially in “Peaches” and “Green Genes,” which are intricately flowing streams of melody. Ryan C. describes “Peaches” as “joyous,” and although that’s not precisely the word I would choose, it’s not far off. (What is the word? I’m not sure, otherwise I would use it.) And “Willie the Pimp” more than justifies a claim I’ve heard and discounted: that Zappa was a terrific guitarist. Even though it’s time to move on to another album for these weekly reviews, I keep wanting to hear this one again.
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