864 Frank Zappa - Lumpy Gravy (1968)

Studio Album - Sound Collage

About the Act:

It’s hard to know what to say about Frank Zappa. There has been a lot written about him and it would be easy to parrot a lot of that. If you want to dig into his history, there’s plenty to go at.

He was prolific. Between 1966 and his death in 1993 he released 62 albums. Since then, 50 more albums have been released. Oh, he was American, I guess that’s relevant. He had a band in the early days, The Mothers of Invention. Soma albums are credited to "The Mothers of Invention" some to "Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention" and after the band was disbanded, they were just credited to him.

He is musically hard to describe, some of his output could be classified as Prog, some as Jazz-Rock, some as Avant-Garde Classical, and often it owes more to German Cabaret than anything. It can be complex, and he was an amazing guitarist, who surrounded himself with amazing musicians. He apparently got frustrated with orchestras for hire because they couldn’t play what he wanted them to. Later in life he was starting to embrace cutting-edge synths and sequencing.

So sometimes, the music is front and centre, but often it is the backdrop to his songs. Subject matter: social satire, often disguised as songs about banal things, but then he seems to take just as seriously songs that truly are about banal things. It would not be safe to put one of his albums on at work, or in front of the kids, if you didn’t already know the content, as it is often very adult. And that includes the spoken stuff on live albums. Be prepared for explicit sexual content, political commentary and anti-religious sentiment, all of which is mixed up with a peculiar absurdist humour.

He has a cult following. Presumably some people have bought all 100+ albums. I have listened to a good number of them and am still undecided about him. 

About the Album:

This was the first album Frank Zappa made under his own name, and it was made with Capitol, whilst he was under contract with MGM, a contract that forbade him from recording with other labels. Apparently, he was under the impression that while he could not play for recordings for other labels, that there was a loophole if he conducted, and the album was conceived as a modern sort of classical piece, played by a group of musicians he dubbed the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, which included a few of the Mothers. When it was released in 1967, it had to be withdrawn and there followed a legal battle between Capitol and MGM about it. If was re-released in 1968 by MGM, but in the intervening time Frank had heavily edited it, turning it from a music piece into a "Music concrete" piece, which now involved some new recorded music (mostly of a Surf style) and spoken word, recorded by people speaking into an undampened piano to give a strange reverb. Speed changes and multi-editing abounds and the end product is more of a collage of disparate things than anything.

My History with this Album:

About 10 years ago I gained a catalogue of Frank Zappa music, which included this album, but in that big pile I don't remember particularly listening to this one.

Review:

Wow, what a lot of words I have used before I even get to the review bit. It's weird. It's kind of hard to know what to make of it, in the same way that I'm not sure what Botticelli would have made of Jackson Pollock. It may be genius, it may be a mess, and maybe it's a bit of both.  There are sections of spoken, inane or nonsensical conversations. There are sections of several kinds of music, notably of the "surf sound" pop/rock, and modern discordant classical, and several shades in-between. There is a lot of editing and stuttering burbs of very speeded-up bits until the final effect is a bit like the floor of my bedroom when I was 16. There is nothing particularly offensive in any of it (always a danger with random bits of Zappa), although one of the people speaking has a very irritating laugh indeed. 

I listened to it twice. Often I listen more casually followed by a more focused listen. In this occasion that was reversed, mostly because the first listen, I stopped what I was doing because I was somewhat entranced by the train wreck. The second time I let it happen as I did other things. Strange to say, but it seemed to make more sense under less scrutiny.

I think the best thing I can say about it is that it is nonsense, in the same way that Edward Lear and others produced nonsense poetry, that deliberately challenged the norm, this is a deliberate challenge to many norms, musical, what an album can be, editing, the flow of an album... and it deliberately doesn't make sense. Musically, I'm not a fan. I don't get the modern classical stuff, which is challenging to say the least, I don't rate the surf music bits. I'm also not a fan of the speech sections, and I'm often opposed to too much speech on what I think of as a music album. None of the elements are things I would listen to out of choice in isolation. But, in the bizarre collage-like editing, it starts to take on a meta-life  - just one of nonsense.

So on balance, my final number has to be a balance between liking the whole, but being less bothered by the parts.

6.5/10 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5xF5RnNiPVOHQkNEXkFSLh

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwyH9rAkugI

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpy_Gravy