Frank Zappa

A madman. Or perhaps a lucid mind in a world of fools. Frank Zappa is whatever the human mind might suggest, but above all he's an artist who's impossible to forget or pigeonhole once you've gotten to know him. In the '50s he had one love and one goal: he loved the blues and wanted to use it to make serious money, and he said as much without shame: "I want to have my own band and make piles of cash".

From the very start, Zappa had a crystal-clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He drew inspiration from contemporary avant-garde artists like Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose influence on him would be evident from his earliest works. Zappa is a cultured artist, one with no qualms about mocking the rampant bigotry of America's buttoned-up society of the time. His songs go well beyond mere melody: in his hands, music becomes a razor-sharp sword with which to tear apart traditionalism, not just in terms of manners and customs. What Zappa proposes is to overturn the system from within, so that it might also change from without.

Hence "Freak Out", a landmark debut album that amounts to nothing less than a bold attack on prepackaged minds built on hormonally repressed clean living. It's a satirical challenge, a knowing and ironic mockery aimed at a world still basking in an "American Dream" that was, at the time, still intact and wrinkle-free. Zappa showed that this dream was a utopia: through his "stupid songs" (as he himself loved to call them) he became the anarchic mouthpiece for the "freaks", for those who wanted change, and wanted it now.

Zappa doesn't care what others will think of him, doesn't care if he's banned or mocked - he can see into the future, and through this peculiar lens he manages to channel his music, bending it to his own ends. Through sly, come-hither melodies, Zappa drops revolutionary lines that, like arrows, stir up scandalized storms and cries of outrage: "Mister America, walk on by/ the schools that you have mystified/ Mister America, try to hide/ the emptiness that's you inside/ when once you find that the way you lied/ and the empty trials you have tried/ won't take the place of the way I feel...". Lines that carry within them the seeds of revolution.

In his own way, Zappa was a precursor of the anarchic movement that would, a few years later, be filed under the label "punk", anticipating it in substance even before sonic impact and, above all, visual impact. He himself was the first to feel like an outsider, in an abnormal, eccentric world, within a bigoted, buttoned-up society that was at heart stupid and afraid of change, terrified to look toward the horizon of the future - a grotesque generation of countless Peter Pans who, ultimately (even if the masses of the time would never admit it), had no wish to grow up and were afraid to look at themselves in the mirror, to the point of becoming a caricature of themselves. And it's out of these caricatures that Zappa builds his freak world, in an attempt to turn it upside down. Like a spider spinning its web to trap its prey, Zappa uses sounds that are (at times) sweet and melodic to lure in the unsuspecting listener, only to catch them with their pants down and show them, as in some imaginary mirror, everything the listener really is and has long stubbornly refused to acknowledge.

Frank Zappa is an absolute genius, one who can't simply be filed under the heading of musician or guitarist: he's an artist, an innovator, perhaps the innovator par excellence. A man who never made one album or one piece of work resemble the one before it, a figure who, beyond mocking and challenging society, also knew how to laugh at himself, with subtle and intelligent self-irony. An honest, uncompromising artist who rode the creative instinct of genius, following consistently twisting paths that in many cases went unappreciated by the masses of the day, only to be rediscovered later precisely because they were too innovative for their time. He was a pioneer of rock, one of the very few. At times he lost his way, but he never sold out.

All this is "Freak Out", and much more besides. A phenomenal record, then, but one that shouldn't be viewed song by song - rather, it needs to be taken as a whole: the titles hardly matter, since they blend and shape one another. "Freak Out" is a record that never exhausts its message no matter how many times you listen to it, containing within itself a myriad of colors and shades that never stop surprising. Even after years of listening, in fact, it's still possible to find, within these grooves, the tiniest idea that had, for so long, escaped even the most attentive of listeners. And that overlooked idea is crucial, precisely because it puts the whole artistic discourse of this work back into play.

The opening "Hungry Freaks Daddy" is a beat-soaked rock-blues number, as well as a direct indictment of the system: the sound is still a bit raw, but it's the artistic integrity and the arrangements that really surprise. Little noises scattered here and there, almost like advertising jingles, create a deliberately cartoonish effect. "I Ain't Got No Heart" is another key piece of the record, built on a multi-voiced vocal delivery steeped in British-style blues colors. A "progressive" track, in the sense that its melodic sequence builds a genuine crescendo of tension, reaching its climax through a gritty rhythm and an increasingly mocking vocal.

"Who Are The Brain Police?" rests on a tight, sinister bass riff, the vocals are sardonic, dissolving into a whisper riddled with electric dissonances that sweep away the only seemingly innocent backing vocals that preceded them. Frank Zappa dives headlong into the most erudite avant-garde, creating sounds that border on the unlistenable and are far from easy to digest, experimenting with sound at its root and dwelling on this aspect repeatedly, as if to underline the sense of noisy chaos from which not just this track but the whole album springs. Chaos, a sense of unease, rules swept aside by powerful winds of change, melodic art pilloried through a spasmodic and profound refinement: this is the Zappa paradox. Behind a veneer of fake stupidity lies a deadly serious pursuit that clashes with the satirical, grotesque image that runs riot throughout the record.

It's a genuine joy to listen to Zappa's music, and "Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder" proves it: a true divertissement and send-up of countless syrupy 60s high-school dances, superbly recreated through pitch-perfect vocal performances and falsettos, nasal and "negroid" harmonies, all wrapped in a diabetically sugary sentiment in which Zappa wallows like a shark in a sea populated by goldfish. Pure fun. "Motherly Love" is an angry beat song, symphonically arranged and broken up by the usual short, jarring interludes made of warbles and cartoonish vocal noises. "How Could I Be Such A Fool" hints at soul sonorities, and for a moment Zappa seems to turn serious, less venomous, and perhaps more accommodating - but it's only an impression, swept away by "Wowie Zowie", with its winking, crystalline guitar riff and the usual repetitive sardonic vocals, made of little choruses and backed by a rhythmic bed of rock'n'roll and noisy refrains, populated by cabaret-style gags, with ragged voices peeking out from the grooves of the track like voices out of step with the choir, refusing to keep quiet.

"You Didn't Try To Call Me", at least on the surface, opens in a way unusual for Zappa's standards, with a guitar intro so sunny it seems as though a clear sky has suddenly broken through the mass of oddities shown up to that point; but as usual it's only an impression, demolished by sudden shifts in rhythm and abrupt breaks courtesy of horns that push the rock idiom forward, enriching it with a symphonic quality never heard before, and voices that assert themselves with one melody only to suddenly overlap with opposing melodies, creating in the listener a clear sense of disorientation. A genuine showcase of eclecticism, of change, of ideas gushing out, completely upending everything initially proposed, and then, as if nothing had happened, the chaotic melody rejoins with apparent simplicity the one it started from, as though it had all been a sly interlocking game. The same holds true for the following track, "Any Way The Wind Blows", which continues along the same lines, showing just how much fake innocence the society of the time fed on.

"I'm Not Satisfied" is gripping from the very start: a liquid piano in the background embroiders melodic notes that clash with Zappa's vocal melody, which comes back together through grotesque vocalizations and leads us into atmospheres with a fake beat'n'roll flavor. "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here" ventures into surf sonorities, which are however immediately swept aside by Zappa's venomous humor, while "Trouble Every Day" is a genuine indictment of the Watts riots in Los Angeles: the atmosphere is incandescent, with a plaintive harmonica mixing with hard, direct vocals. The overdubbed electric guitars are enveloping and repeat the same melody, while the rhythm section is heavy and incisive. A primordial rap, dare I say, with its dark, inescapable march, much like "Help, I'm A Rock", marked by a doom-laden, repetitive, monotonously chilling pall, with off-screen voices and bass and guitar walking hand in hand, ticking off the metropolitan grayness like a sad metronome.

"It Can't Happen Here" opens with a burst of off-key voices, an amorphous language, which dies down as instruments are left free to roam into free-jazz territory, but the voices intrude again, pulling the plug on the amplifiers and creating that mass of murmurs that turns the song into an amorphous body with no clearly defined lines. As a two-way dialogue fades out, that masterpiece "The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet" takes shape. A gigantic 12-minute suite, with spatial sounds and a solitary rhythm section with no melodic accompaniment, eccentric and chaotic tribalism, experimentation at the edges of the imaginable are the ingredients of this score overflowing with noise and carrying signals from an anarchic realm, where all laws and rules have gone to hell and the only hymn everyone is devoted to is precisely the absence of any specific order.

In closing, a special mention for that first, fantastic lineup that went by the name Mothers of Invention, namely: Ray Collins on vocals and harmonica, Roy Estrada on bass, Elliot Ingber on rhythm guitar, Jimmy Carl Black on drums, alongside our host, who certainly needs no introduction...

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14/11/2006