‘Black Napkins’: Frank Zappa’s single greatest guitar moment
We all know that Frank Zappa was bonkers mad. This is an opinion that has been thrown around incredibly frequently as a reaction to his often experimental, satirical and eccentric stylings, and for the most part, people aren’t exactly wrong to think this.
But for all of his musical theatrics and ability to divide opinion, he was also a genius at his craft, and there are plenty of things lying deep beneath his zany personality and presentation that go a long way to prove this. You can’t deny that Zappa’s name belongs alongside the greats when listing the greatest of all time, regardless of whether his output is something you can get on board with, and this splitting of the audience between those who consider him an unparalleled talent and those who think of him as a weirdo charlatan ought to both be able to see that there was something special there.
Yes, his songs and albums may have seemed a little too wacky for their own good at times, but what went into them was indicative of a musical savant, and part of the frustration that bubbled within him was that people didn’t quite understand the levels he was operating on. It must be tough for someone with such a formidable talent to be continually derided by audiences, but he rose to it in a way that indicated he simply didn’t care and was only interested in being authentic to himself.
On a technical level, his musicianship was always a marvel to behold, especially on his primary instrument – the guitar, but his approaches to composition also prove that he was something of a misunderstood genius. You can look at an album like Joe’s Garage as a bloated and overwrought mess of a concept, or you perceive it as the work of someone who was throwing virtually everything he had to give into a complex narrative and a spectacle of outré performance art: both are arguably right, but that divisiveness was clearly something that Zappa wanted to offer up in order to separate the critics from those who knew exactly what he was doing.
So, it comes as something of a surprise that his finest guitar work is not heard on some loopy, noodling track that attempts to show off his brilliance in a multitude of convoluted ways, but on a lamentful instrumental jam where his band are keeping things simple and straightforward while he lets loose. There are no puerile gags to lean on, nothing to satirise, and no Captain Beefheart cameos – this is Zappa expressing himself through a rip-roaring display of guitar virtuosity.
‘Black Napkins’, for the majority of its four-minute runtime, is based around just two chords, but the electrifying manner in which Zappa solos over the top of his band shows not just that he was able to display range in emotions, but also his proficiency in being able to develop off-the-cuff ideas around something so simplistic. This track is proof that not everything needs to be darting around the place in a frenzy, and a common misconception about Zappa’s work is that he only knew how to confound people.
Being unpredictable was in Zappa’s nature as an artist, and when people may have least expected him to deliver something as solemn, serious and majestic as ‘Black Napkins’, he knew that was exactly what he needed to do. He was a master of his craft, and one that many guitarists both in the jazz and progressive rock worlds look up to, and while he may have been an opinionated, stubborn and aloof kind of figure, he proved that beneath the surface of being the joker of the rock world, he could create deeply profound and evocative art just as well as the rest of his peers.
