‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’: The most mind-melting moment in Frank Zappa’s discography
During the 52 years that he spent with us on Earth, Frank Zappa released 62 albums. Since his 1994 death, his family have released a further 67 works in his name. To do the maths, he was quite simply, prolific.
A singer, composer, orchestrator, guitarist, bandleader, improviser, experimentalist and all-round odd-ball, Zappa’s compositions can be characterised by his need to rebel against the norm, to expand the accepted soundscapes of popular recordings and to push the boundaries of what can be done in the studio or on stage.
Whether it was in his experimental psychedelic rock songs or his more abstract, score-like orchestral works, his music always sounded like it was soundtracking a movie from another time and place and planet. Considering how far he was willing to push the limits of his imagination, his creativity, his instruments and the forms that he was working within, it probably would have been far weirder and more unnerving to hear him try his hand at a conventional pop song and to sing it straight.
Songs like ‘Zolar Czakl’ aren’t as weird as they first seem once your ears acclimatise to them, even despite the tape feedback loops and mix of East Asian essences with Eastern European polka, Americana carnival sounds and nightmarish bark-chanting (maybe that one is pretty weird, on second thoughts). Some of his more far out compositions, like ‘The Girl In The Magnesium Dress’, would sound far weirder if you hadn’t already had nightmares after listening to Tom Waits’ Bone Machine album. Everything on Jazz From Hell, the last studio album released in Zappa’s lifetime, is pretty strange by anyone else’s standards, but maybe not so much by his own when you’ve heard everything that came before it.
Perhaps then, that context is key when approaching Frank Zappa’s oeuvre. His later stuff might not sound so madcap by his own standards, but that’s because he set the standard with albums like 1970s Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Sure, everyone else was experimenting at this point, expanding their minds and horizons, but was anyone else doing it like this?
A man might have touched the moon a year before this album came out, but in songs like ‘Toads of the Short Forest’, Zappa and his band, the Mothers of Invention, were pitching for something even more Andromedal. ‘The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue’ sounds like something that would play in a galaxy where this song soundtracks the lobby of an extra-terrestrial White Lotus while Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Hotel Base + Casino is just another Travelodge on Mars.
‘Dwarf Nebula Processional and Dwarf Nebula’ might sound like a hundred different songs playing simultaneously, beaming in from a hundred different galaxies, but, for the most part, all of the song parts sound pretty good.
Since the album came out in 1970, plenty of other artists may have joined Zappa on these far off moon-units and supernatural explorations, plenty of others (and Zappa himself) have made weirder records, but, he was the first one out there among the stars, planting his freak-flag firmly in the ground of new and unexplored territories.
