Frank Zappa

"Absolutely Free" (recorded in 1966), like "Freak Out!" (1965-1966) and "We're Only In It For Money/Lumpy Gravy" (1967-1968; two albums bound to each other, above all because they originated from the same sessions), are the records making up the "critical body of work" of Frank Zappa, encompassing his first recording period, from 1965 to 1968, united by a shared purpose - to shake bourgeois consciences awake - though developed with different tones and traits.

The mood of the debut "Freak Out!" is vivid, colourful, ever-shifting in its mockery, brimming with imaginative fervour, Promethean in bringing out the emotional clashes between different musical genres. The songwriting is more spontaneous and uneven than in the following chapters, which by comparison are more schematic: a continuous fusion of disparate elements, playful in effect, more experimental yet just as listenable - just think of the opener "Hungry Freaks Daddy".

"Absolutely Free" is the peak of the series, musically the most organised, more compact than its predecessor but less so than its successor, perhaps the most accomplished and mature in compositional terms, but not the darkest - that honour goes to the third chapter.

But what exactly does "Absolutely Free" criticise? Corporate consumers, militarists, Nixon and the Vietnam War, those who build their whole culture on the evening news and daily reports, TV preachers, hyped-up cheerleaders, hippies, drugged-out utopians and layabouts, unions, the comforting music of FM radio, freaks (of whom Zappa would be considered the "father"): he spares no one and defends no one, his thinking is independent and free.

The album features: Frank Zappa (guitar, vocals), Ray Collins (vocals), the main vocal lead on the comic skits, Roy Estrada (electric bass and falsetto vocals), Jim Black (drums, trumpet), Don Preston (keyboards), of jazz background, capable of sketching out the first surreal passages that would go on to inspire progressive rock and kosmische musik, Ian Underwood (keyboards, sax), Bunk Gardner (horns and various noises), Billy Mundi (percussion), Jim Fiedler (guitar), Zarubica (female voice, playing Susy Creamcheese, a stereotype of the groupie).

"Plastic People" is a vaudeville number that spins together choruses from Richard Berry's Louie Louie (perhaps the most famous and most covered song of all time), furious spoken word from Zappa, Black, Estrada and Zarubica, and Mundi's hammering percussion. The musical banalities of Tin Pan Alley and vocal groups were the listening of choice for many teenagers of the era, symbolically swept away by the final assault of an anthem built from avant-garde influences (spoken word) and the most visceral strains of Black music (percussion), which at the time - imported into an influential style by Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts - was setting the pace for rock proper, until then clearly defined only on the guitar side (by Chuck Berry) and not rhythmically.

"The Duke Of Prunes" makes use of Collins's operatic baritone singing, in absurd contrast with the dreamy sweetness of the background chant (another oxymoron): a track perfectly suited to the world of English folk and progressive rock, a genre yet to emerge, which this song helped to define - not just in sound and mood, but also in its sonic openness and its ambition to expand the basic rock band (guitar, bass, drums and voice) into a chamber-music ensemble (with a broad embrace of horns, the addition of instruments unusual or "exotic" for the genre, and a taste for bizarre stylistic mixtures); just listen to the title track "In The Court Of The Crimson King" by King Crimson, from 1969, to find all these traits.

"Amnesia Vivace", on the other hand, is a proto-noise collage, mostly atonal, one of the few Zappa pieces that pays homage rather than mockery.

Quotes from Stravinsky's "The Rite Of Spring" and "The Firebird" are (following Ives's lesson) set colliding against each other, detonating into a shapeless noise maelstrom, embellished with more or less altered concrete sounds (Varèse docet); a reworking of the academicism of contemporary classical music, but in a more "American" key, freer and less bound to the rationalism of the Viennese school.

Zappa loved to disguise himself, like an actor, and "perform" different genres, a constant tendency throughout his career. A striking example of this is an underrated track, dismissed as frivolous, "Duke Regains His Chops": the orchestral theme that made up the melody of "Duke Of Prunes" is vulgarised through a song that was then famous for its bourgeois, conformist sentiments, delivered with the screaming choruses of Collins and Zappa: "Baby Love" by the Supremes, the Black, female, soul vocal group of the '50s. The quotation is sped up towards the end, turning into a vocal orgy between the two men's yelling and Estrada's falsetto, layered over Zappa's clean vocal line, which carries on the nursery rhyme with emphasis; the instruments express themselves in strong, solemn accents.

"Call Any Vegetable" consists of a scrappy, crude, amateurish (in a word, lo-fi) reprise of Ives's multiple collision of three American patriotic anthems: "Star-Spangled Banner", "God Bless America" and "America The Beautiful", which... "collided with each other", to use the author's own words. The concrete sounds scattered throughout are symbols of the American way of life, exactly like Warhol's cans of beans, with the difference that they don't remain isolated signals, but are reinforced by the tonal and timbral destruction of the cornerstones of traditional America (the three anthems): Zappa forces the average listener in his country to take a cultural step forward through musical evolution - evolution that is, on a deeper level, compositional, and on a more surface level, stylistic and acoustic, rhythmic and timbral.

From an initial phase of sociological stigmatization, the record moves into a lesson in ethnomusicology applied to grotesque art. In this section, the drive for musical renewal doesn't skimp on references to the past, placing almost every type of instrument, influence and mood from music history — of the most varied geographical origin — on the same level: it's no coincidence that, in the track under examination, several vocal styles take part, such as operatic singing and Alpine yodel, counterpoints between elements of Black popular music, here represented by the soprano sax, and long-forgotten, disused sounds, like the archaic, evocative, glittering notes of the harpsichord-like arpicordo, in use back in the 1500s; these erudite references, though, are stripped of the veneer of scholarliness that always lurks around the corner in this kind of revisitation, by means of a nursery rhyme halfway between the demented and the mocking, in a Brechtian vein.

"Invocation & Ritual Dance of The Young Pumpkin/Soft-Cell Conclusion" closes the first, self-titled part of the record and stands out for a psychedelic excursion, highly varied in melody and rhythm, over which the lively, impassioned, exotic sax of "Motorhead" Jim Sherwood and the author's guitar rage, delivering his first searing solo ever recorded on record.

The second part is a study of different musical languages, whereas the first, in its sociological critique, is closer to the debut, "Freak Out!". Called "M.O.I. American Pageant", it's the section that presents the boldest instrumental solutions, all while remaining coherent as a portrayal: "America Drinks" and "America Drinks & Goes Home" are indeed tracks where musical exploration goes hand in hand with a critique of American society, setting to music the reassuring, claustrophobic daily habits that lead most of the bourgeoisie into empty, petty ways of living. These inescapable yet limiting, suffocating certainties, which the mediocre can't bring themselves to give up, are symbolized by the jingling of the cash register in the second of the two tracks described above, a "busy", hysterical portrait of a society as culturally limited as Ireland's at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In Zappa, in fact, the cash register is the musical, American equivalent of the smell of crètonne dust covering the curtains and radiators in the homes of the "Dubliners" (People of Dublin) described by the Irish writer James Joyce: in that novel, Dublin's cultural distance from the rest of Europe and the world weighed like a boulder on the minds and destinies of its inhabitants; in the same way, consumerist voracity, mass hysteria, and above all the greed of American society from the mid-20th century onward (post-economic boom) hang like a sword of Damocles over the mental and cultural development of that same society and its members.

"America Drinks", which opens the second LP, is the emblem of this dessication, of fat-headed ignorance, of the shallowness of so many lives: a jazz drum shuffle, hopelessly calm and continuous, indifferent, soft, as in the most "respectable" nightspots, the syrupy singing of crooners, the fake vitality of Tin Pan Alley's little theatrics. The mockery of sad (in content) lounge-jazz-pop expresses exactly this defeatist attitude toward life. The end of the track jolts that laziness awake through an energetic burst of psychedelia, whose loose genre boundaries represent the turning point of a newly matured moral and vital awareness (even though this genre would later disappoint Zappa for its unshakeable attachment to lysergic acid, so often used as a mental alteration to escape rationality).

"Status Back Baby" fuses Stravinsky's "Petrushka" with doo-wop for jazz clarinet — which gets a recorded solo — and whistle, among the band's other instruments. With the innate attitude toward "linguistic equivalence" typical of Zappa, contemporary, experimental, European, white classical music is blended with doo-wop, the popular genre par excellence, light and rooted in the Black community; the jazz-inflected clarinet solo represents the meeting point of the two: neither shallow, nor scholarly.

"Uncle Bernie's Farm" is a blues-cadenced track, but the tavern-style chorus and the jingling vibraphone turn it into a bold assemblage of popular elements, the musical equivalent of the exhibition at the Venice Biennale that made Robert Rauschenberg's name in 1964, which nonetheless lacked the organizing hand of the composer from Baltimore.

"Son Of Suzy Creamcheese" is an interlude featuring a vocal assault, mostly choral, with Zarubica's voice as its protagonist.

Zappa's effectiveness doesn't lie in elaborate twenty-minute compositions (as the Romantic symphonists were capable of, for instance), but in the architecture and compression of an impressive quantity of inventions of every kind (rhythmic, timbral, harmonic and melodic) into gags that very rarely exceed 8 minutes — indeed, they often last no longer than a pop song — in which the artist fuses wildly different impulses that flow by, dense and rapid, like snapshots from an expressionist film.

"Brown Shoes Don't Make It" is the most complex, stylistically speaking, as well as the longest, at almost eight minutes, testament of "Absolutely Free": a collage of pop, rustic, circus, r&b, Varèse-indebted and erudite 20th-century clichés in general, psychedelic, world-atonal à la Moondog, a caricatured fresco of the ugliness and emptiness of Western society, where fragments of the various genres correspond semiotically to the social milieu they belong to, the one that spawned them.

"America Drinks & Goes Home" is the simplest example for understanding Zappa's technique. Some think that Zappa, in certain cases, played at random, without planning, like Cage or Varèse, that his music was experimental, driven by acoustic curiosity rather than artistic construction. Nothing could be more wrong: Zappa was experimental in his studio, trying out various combinations, but for release he selected whichever, within the specific economy of the piece, produced the greatest grotesque or satirical effect, or delivered the maximum provocation and moral jolt (note: not technical provocation, a concept belonging to the classic avant-gardes, which he had moved beyond and fiercely contested), and which best suited the specific message he wanted to convey; the sound of a cash register would carry no meaning in itself, were it not played within a nightclub jazz piece (the ultimate relaxing background music), with crooning vocals (the most tear-jerking, fashionable, reassuring style of singing of the era) and the noise of a squabbling, shouting crowd (symbolizing the populace). This is a critique of consumerism (the cash register), of hypocritical respectability — music regarded as high-class and never listened to attentively, lounge jazz — or of stereotype, full of nice, shallow sentiments, crooning; polite manners that, once swallowed up by the masses, turn into hysteria and rage.

The Eisensteinian effect typical of "montage of attractions" — which sets the symbols placed together into a dialectical opposition, a kind of reflection that, in this case, links the canons of the bourgeois class (the various musical styles used to symbolize it), the shouting crowd, and money — leads the listener to view the bourgeoisie as a culturally uniform, anonymous mass that accepts whatever is put in front of it (music is merely a reassuring backdrop, not an art form). This is also a scathing critique of the contemporary classical audience, utterly at the mercy of musicians' often incomprehensible experiments, driven only by the desire to grab money and material security.

This analysis of "America Drinks Goes Home" is an example of how meticulously Zappa prepared the writing of sounds and genres, and of how this achieved an artistic realization that was inevitably missing, or faint and isolated, in the work of the composers who inspired him.

The last two tracks, included in the CD-ROM edition, were absent from the original double LP and had previously been released as a single ahead of the album.

"Big Leg Emma" is a revisitation of the goofy pop songs of the late '50s and early '60s (in the vein of the Tokens), built on the repetition of the assonant, rhyming line "A big dilemma for a big leg Emma" — nothing more, then, than an amused, negligible homage to that style.

"Why Don't Cha Do Me Right?" (note the use of the slang "cha" in the title, commonplace nowadays in rap and hip-hop as a mark of ostentatious authenticity and street cred, but used here with unassuming naturalness) is a sullen blues, with hard-rock guitars (three years ahead of Led Zeppelin), an obsessive clavinet in the background, and vocals that are, once again, interesting and unpredictable: cocky and doomed, in low tones, at the start, giving way to the frontman's rambling baritone spoken-word finale, which steals the scene from everyone else.

The musical and sociological sides are both developed throughout every chapter of this "critical polyptych": "Freak Out!" is more of an ethical-musical lesson, whereas "Absolutely Free" leans more toward the ethical-social, and "We'Re Only/Lumpy Gravy" stands as a bitter, powerless reckoning with the cultural squalor of the masses.

"Absolutely Free" is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century music, a work that makes Frank Zappa one of the essential composers of his century.

Note: although today it's associated with the leader alone, the album was released under the name Mothers Of Invention, the band that, despite numerous lineup changes, backed him until the mid-1970s.

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15/11/2009