The five songs Frank Zappa was most proud of
One of the first obstacles that faces any curious music fan attempting to grapple with Frank Zappa’s voluminous oeuvre is just exactly where to start.
The Zappaverse is an unwieldy one. To the delight of his fans, the former Mothers of Invention captain boasts less a discography and more a comix gloop of intermingling and mutually mulched film projects, Broadway offerings, and a bewilderingly hefty volume of records that all cluster and constellate around Zappa’s satirical excoriations of the US media and political landscape.
Shifting aside his 70-odd posthumous releases since 1993, but the generally agreed core back catalogue casts a blurred spectrum between studio effort and live recording, often mixing material up in a disorienting fashion wrought from Zappa’s equal parts editor, as well as musician and producer. Across his eclectic scope of freak rock, cartoonish jazz, musique concrète collages, and classical orchestral works, the internal ecosystem that Zappa’s work floats amid with shared conceptual gel is only rivalled by George Clinton’s P-Funk’s Afrofuturist mythos.
“It’s all one album,” Zappa confessed to Rolling Stone in 1968, two months after his Lumpy Gravy solo debut. “All the material in the albums is organically related and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order it still would make one piece of music you can listen to. Then I could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way, and it still would make sense. I could do this 20 ways. The material is definitely related”.
With such a disregard for peripheries among his unruly songbook, you would think picking out numbers he was particularly proud of would prove futile, but Zappa managed to glean some definite gems from his surrealist cosmos in the interview. Even two years into the Mothers, Zappa had packed a lot in.
Such scattered montages are starkly crystallised on Lumpy Gravy, a two-part canvas of orchestral pieces, surf music, and spoken word intermissions spliced from hundreds of taped sessions.
While songs in the strictest sense are difficult to decipher from the teeming sprawl, Zappa picks ‘Pigs and Ponies’ as a number that stands as an artistic high point in his estimation. No such cut features on the 1995 CD issue, which broke down the two parts into separately indexed tracks, but the smattering of snorting swine that smatters chunks of Lumpy Gravy must feature Zappa’s beloved ‘Pigs and Ponies’ somewhere buried that only he knows the location of.
Zappa’s second pick jumps to We’re Only in It for the Money’s arch-cynical garbage fire to the hippie revolution. A companion song to the album’s prior ‘Let’s Make the Water Turn Black’ track, ‘The Idiot Bastard Son’ tells the familial background of Ronald and Kenneth Williams, two supposedly grotty brothers Zappa lived next door to in Ontario, who largely entertained themselves by smearing snot on the windows and lighting their farts on fire.
As ever, there’s a fine line between fact and fiction in the Zappaverse, but the crusty number’s shuffle between rock theatre, busy vocal collages, and whispered monologues flashes The Mothers of Invention at their most creative.
Rifling through Absolutely Free’s oratorio splatter, Zappa selects its penultimate ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ cut for his bag of favourites, a seven-odd minute snapshot of political corruption, centring on the queasy scene of a City Hall official sexually fantasising over a 13-year-old girl—crumples several mini suites of psych, classical, music hall, and primitive electronics from keyboardist Don Preston’s DIY synthesizer in its dizzyingly epic, if squalid, comic strip assault.
Lastly, Zappa heads back to where it all started in 1966, pointing to two cuts from 1966’s Freak Out! debut. Second single ‘Who Are the Brain Police?’ is highlighted, a nightmarishly strange piece that cautions against self-censorship and slavish obedience to authority, one of the many lapses into smug, libertarian elitisms that can befall the Mothers man, followed by ‘It Can’t Happen Here’, the third movement of ‘Help, I’m a Rock’s three sections, pursuing more spooky vocal swirls amid avant-garde compositional splurge.
You keeping up? With the Zappaverse scaring off many with its daunting, colossal headache of a catalogue, perhaps the five selections by the man himself may offer the perfect hors d’oeuvre to the sprawling strangeness of Frank Zappa’s burning creative visions.
The five songs Frank Zappa was most proud of:
- ‘Pigs and Ponies’
- ‘The Idiot Bastard Son’
- ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’
- ‘Who Are the Brain Police?’
- ‘It Can’t Happen Here’
