Frank Zappa once named “the best-engineered rock ‘n’ roll record”
In many ways, the first hipster in music, Frank Zappa, loved an opinion that veered off the beaten track. Ranging from accounts about his art to the turbulent political landscape, the American rocker always kept fans on their toes, which supplemented his musical efforts and played a crucial part in establishing such a lauded legacy.
A misanthrope who inspired everyone from ideological successors Steely Dan to Ozzy Osbourne; when Frank Zappa spoke, people listened. Thanks to his natural propensity to go against the grain, Zappa was often asked to comment on other people’s music and thus provided his customarily contentious takes.
One group Zappa had a famously provocative opinion on was The Beatles. Whilst they might be universally hailed as the most significant group of all time for their sonic, aesthetic, and attitude, Zappa didn’t buy it. He was critical of the Fab Four and even claimed he preferred their sugary American alternative, The Monkees.
Notably, Zappa’s band, The Mothers of Invention and their 1968 album, We’re Only In It For The Money, was a sharp satire of the countercultural “movement” of the 1960s and contained some explicit parodies of The Beatles. The album cover was originally intended to be the now-notorious parody of the artwork of the Liverpool group’s 1967 psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but due to pressure from the label, it was included as part of the gatefold sleeve instead.
“Everybody else thought they were God!” Zappa once said of The Beatles. “I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group.” He would also claim that a Rolling Stones album was much better than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in another controversial take.
Pauline Butcher, who was Zappa’s PA from 1967 to 1971, told Louder Sound in 2012: “He was a precociously intelligent man in a business which is not necessarily filled with a lot of intelligent people, and he stood out.”
She continued: “He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones; he didn’t play their kind of music, he didn’t even like it, and if he was going to get himself heard he was going to have to do something radically different. He went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in women’s clothes. All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.”
Despite this well-publicised disdain for The Beatles, Zappa still thought the American issue of 1969’s Abbey Road was “the best-engineered rock ‘n’ roll record”.
He told Let It Rock in 1975: “The American issue of Abbey Road – which has nothing to do with the material on the album but because I think it’s probably the best mastered, best-engineered rock ‘n’ roll record I’ve heard … except that I take exception to the choice of stereo placement.”
Listen to Abbey Road below.
