ANTECEDENTES DE LOS PEDZE

Roaring into the Eighties. Tinsel Town Rebellion (originally released in May 1981 on Barking Pumpkin Records; currently available as Rykodisc RCD 10532). Highest Billboard chart position: No. 66. Personnel: Ike Willis, Ray White, Steve Vai, Warren Cucurullo, Denny Walley, Tommy Mars, Peter Wolf, Bob Harris, Ed Mann, Arthur Barrow, Patrick O’Hearn, Vinnie Colaiuta, and David Logeman. “We cannot return to a past in which Americans harmoniously shared one set of moral values.” 16

The eighties fi nd Zappa in an interesting quandary. His records, especially

Zoot Allures, Sheik Yerbouti, and Joe’s Garage, Acts I, II & III, are selling well,

his concerts are increasingly sold out, he has built his own studio, and he is even beginning to be seen by many in the classical music world as a legitimate composer (both the conductor Kent Nagano and the composer and conduc- tor Pierre Boulez will work with Zappa in the early eighties). Zappa’s fi lm

Baby Snakes comes out to moderate acclaim (a soundtrack will be released in

1983), and the mail-order-only records Shut Up ’N Play Yer Guitar, Shut Up

’N Play Yer Guitar Some More, and The Return of the Son of Shut Up ’N Play Yer Guitar do surprisingly well considering the limited audience (the records,

which this book will not discuss, consist entirely of excerpted guitar solos). So how does one top all of this? Zappa, in what has become typical fash- ion, decides to do a number of things at once. He begins writing a theater piece (which will eventually become Thing-Fish ); he completes work on the

Utility Muffi n Research Kitchen, his technologically advanced home record- ing studio; and he even records a single, “I Don’t Want to Get Drafted,” in response to the Reagan administration’s decision to make men register for the draft. 17 _{In what was becoming an unfortunately regular occurrence,}

Zappa also switched record companies, starting his own Barking Pumpkin label to be distributed by CBS records.

After Joe’s Garage, Zappa had planned to release an album called Warts

and All, which would cull a number of concert performances from the 1978

and 1979 bands. As the album began progressing toward completion, it became apparent that it was going to be unwieldy (Courrier has it as a three- album set). After putting out double albums with Sheik Yerbouti and Joe’s

Garage, Acts I, II & III, Zappa was trying even the most sympathetic record

company’s patience by putting out another huge set. Zappa demurred and shelved the project, sort of.

Some of the music recorded in 1979 ended up on the double live album

Tinsel Town Rebellion, an interesting mix of old, new, improvisations, spoken-

word segues and bits, and some of the best playing by one of the most accomplished bands with whom Zappa ever worked. Three key players make this album worth hearing: Steve Vai, a young, wunderkind guitarist (who would go on to have a wildly successful career as a guitarist with David Lee Roth and Whitesnake and as a writer and producer of his own instrumental guitar albums); drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, who had played on Joe’s Garage but really shines on Tinsel Town; and keyboard, trumpet, and vocalist Bob Harris, who added a falsetto of the likes not heard since the Ray Collins and Roy Estrada days.

It is an interesting album, full of songs that challenge the status quo and radical rearrangements of beloved Mothers of Invention songs that seem cal- culated to either please or upset most everyone. The album begins with two songs about women that have inspired much critical debate. The fi rst, “Fine Girl,” is a pop-reggae song that shows a great deal of professional craft and polish. According to Zappa’s comments in the liner notes, it was recorded and released as a potential single (it is only 3:29, has no guitar solo, and fea- tures a nice, chanting chorus). It is well produced and catchy as hell. So what is wrong with it?

Lyrically, the song marked a new trend in Zappa’s music, one that would fi nd its full realization in Thing-Fish. On “Fine Girl,” Zappa and Ike Willis sing together in a sort of African American dialect that can only be described as cartoonish and based, at least in part, on the dialect developed by the white actors in Amos ’n Andy, a caricature of black speech. The song seems to cel- ebrate the kind of subservient woman that contemporary U.S. men might, after a number of years of feminism, imagine themselves longing for. By giv- ing the song its additional racial dimension, it changes the scope and focus and creates some interesting dynamics. On the one hand, women in the song are considered fi ne girls if they can perform a number of domestic tasks (do

the laundry or change a tire), none of which is terrifi cally demeaning. In fact, a woman’s abilities to change a tire and chop wood for the fi re are decidedly unfeminine activities, a sure sign of a particular kind of feminist progress. Indeed, one of the messages of the song seems to be that a woman is a fi ne girl if she can do it all, which was a common advertising notion at the time. Virginia Slims cigarettes was making the same sort of argument, as was Enjoli perfume, which used as its advertising jingle “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re my man.” The idea behind this jingle was that women could enter the so-called male sphere (bring home the bacon) and yet remain both sexy and desirable. It is problematic but vastly different from the fi fties.

“Fine Girl,” makes a not-so-subtle shift, however; in the fi nal verse, we fi nd out that a fi ne girl is also someone “With a bucket on her head / Fulla water from de well / She could run a mile.” These rather obvious National Geo-

graphic stereotypes of an African woman makes the song much more politi-

cally challenging. Courrier calls it “a mock celebration of strong and noble servant woman,” 18 _{whereas Barry Miles calls it “an unconscious expression}

of Zappa’s violent dislike of the women’s liberation movement.” 19 _{I think}

that Courrier is probably mostly on track; the song, like the songs on Thing-

Fish, is so exaggerated it would take someone with a real ideological axe to

grind to make the claim that Zappa “really meant it” (whatever that might mean). The argument that the song seems to make is that the characters sing- ing are longing for these old days or these kinds of women (this is different than Zappa longing for these days). At around the same time singer-song- writer Randy Newman wrote a song with lyrics like, “This English girl from the North somewhere . . . Talkin’ about the poor niggers all the time . . . I tell her, Darling, don’t talk about things you don’t understand,” 20 _{yet no one}

assumed that he was a racist or even sympathetic toward his character. The argument that “Fine Girl” is somehow a racist fantasy is further complicated by the fact that Zappa had two African American band members at the time (and had featured African Americans in nearly all of his bands). For someone who was a stone racist, Zappa seemed to go out of his way to surround him- self with black folks.

As if “Fine Girl” were not enough of a problem, it then segues into an older (albeit unrecorded) song “Easy Meat.” “Meat” had been performed by the Flo & Eddie band and had been used as a vehicle for extended soloing for a number of years. The version on Tinsel Town Rebellion is expanded to include an orchestral interlude that comes from the 1975 UCLA concert. The fi rst part of the song comes from a concert in Philadelphia, and the solo and outro come from a concert in Santa Monica. Musically, it is one of Zappa’s catchiest songs. It has a dramatic guitar-based opening and, with dif- ferent lyrics, would have been a big hit.

Ah, but the lyrics. Miles claims that this song is indicative of a Zappa dou- ble standard, imagining that, in Zappa’s ideology, “if women asserted their sexuality they were ‘sluts’ or ‘easy meat.’ ” 21 _{It is not quite that easy for two}

reasons. (1) There was a growing sense in the eighties of women taking more control and more responsibility for their own sexuality. The Victorian idea that a woman needed to be protected from men (often by men) was shifting. AIDS, the Reagan backlash, and MTV were all parts of what would become (by the nineties) a fairly complete and radical change in the way both men and women thought about gender roles. (2) The song is another in a long line of Zappa songs about individual responsibility. Take, for instance, the fi rst lines of the fi rst two verses: “This girl is easy meat, I seen her on the street,” and “She wanna take me home, Make me sweat and moan.” The girl may be so-called easy meat, but she is in control of her sexuality. Although the male character singing the song may well be guilty of objectifying the woman, it is apparent in the second verse that she has a part to play in all of this. In her mind, the boy that she takes home is easy meat as well.

It is a tough sell. The song tends to be a sort of Rosetta stone for Zappa critics. Courrier writes that the song is “not so much a sign of misogyny as Zappa’s insistent love of ’50’s R & B slang.” 22 _{Watson claims that the song is}

“a combination of sleaze and pomp” and that the real “joke is the concerto in the middle” of the song. 23 _{(The middle of the song contains a long instru-}

mental break that references a number of ideas from classical music, includ- ing a blistering solo.) In other words, one can read into the song just about anything one wants to. It is important, however, to see the song as both part of a larger, career-long project of critique and as endemic to the time (written in the seventies, fi nally released to the public in the early eighties).

The song that follows, “For the Young Sophisticate,” is a nice breather. Critics tend to ignore this song, but it is important to see it as another of Zappa’s critiques of the shallowness of the culture and the shallowness of love, especially as it is infl uenced by the media. In the middle of the song, Zappa sings about a “young sophisticator” who falls in love with a woman who is “an aggressive agitator,” and falls out of love with her because, in large part, she “doesn’t shave her underarms.”

Although this song has some similarities to the Barbara Streisand–Robert Redford movie The Way We Were, it is also Zappa’s critique of the shallow- ness of both the characters, that their so-called love is based largely on surface issues. The punch line of the song is when Zappa argues, in the fi nal verse, that the boy would still love the girl no matter that she looked like. Musically, the song features an interesting percussion track featuring some excellent work by Ed Mann and some fi ne drumming by Vinnie Colaiuta.

Two of the songs on the album, “Panty Rap” and “Dance Contest,” are interesting for fans, perhaps, because they give one a taste of what made a

Zappa concert a unique event. Although bands have always had vocalists screaming at the audience to try to get them to sing along, Zappa becomes an old-fashioned lounge-band master of ceremonies, talking to the audi- ence, telling them stories, goading them into all sorts of weirdness. In “Panty Rap,” Zappa is asking the women in the audience to throw their panties up on stage, not for the gratifi cation of the band but for a quilt being prepared by a woman named Emily James. 24 _{Although Miles fi nds this to be more evi-}

dence of Zappa’s growing sexism (throwing panties was, according to Miles, “something Elvis and Tom Jones didn’t have to ask their audiences to do” 25 _),

I fi nd it to be fi ne evidence of Zappa’s absurdist project: (1) Zappa was, musically and artistically, the complete opposite of Elvis and Tom Jones; and (2) the fact that these panties were being used as an art project must have struck a chord in Zappa. The rap is played over the music from “Black Napkins,” which also shows off the ability of the band to capture a particular mood. The band members are clearly following Zappa closely, and one can hear small musical cues within the background that force one to pay attention.

The same thing occurs during “Dance Contest.” Zappa had been holding dance contests for a while, usually getting everything set up and then launch- ing the band into “The Black Page,” a song that is virtually impossible to dance to (that is the joke, get it?). On Tinsel Town, Zappa allows the listener to hear the kind of controlled chaos that he loved to create through enforced audience participation (for an incredible example of this, listen to the version of “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” recorded with the same band that is on You

Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 1. ). In “Dance Contest,” Zappa makes

the statement:

I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you’re out there and you’re cute, maybe you’re beautiful, I just want to tell you somethin’—there’s more of us ugly mother-fuckers than you are, hey-y, so watch out.

In many ways this is Zappa’s philosophy: From his earliest recordings Zappa has been mocking and critiquing the unearned privilege of the beautiful peo- ple. This fl at-out statement of contempt for the beautiful, and the realization that the ugly have an unacknowledged power, is important in understanding both Zappa and his fans.

After “Dance Contest” come two fairly interesting pieces: “Blue Light” and “Tinsel Town Rebellion.” “Blue Light” is a marvelous postmodern collage of various pieces of sixties pop culture detritus: Winchell’s donuts, Shakey’s Pizza, Brut cologne, Donovan (and his song “Atlantis,” always a favorite target of Zappa’s). The song is more than a list, however; it is a discussion of how Americans are drowning in consumerism as the country turns more toward the right (the Reagan-era economic theory labeled trickle-down eco- nomics dictated that if tax breaks were given to people—especially people

already making a lot of money—then people would have more money to buy stuff, and that, in turn, would stimulate the economy). It is a hilarious critique of the willingness of the American people to believe anything. Speak- ing of believing anything, at one point Zappa warns of “ Death Valley Days straight ahead.” This is clearly a reference to newly elected president Ronald Reagan, who had been a host on the television show Death Valley Days early in his career and, according to some, had never really understood that his role as president was fundamentally different from his role as cowboy. Zappa, of course, as a long-term Californian, had experienced Reagan before—he was governor during much of the unrest in the sixties—and was, to Zappa at least, a known quantity. The title of the song is a bit of a mystery, although I have always liked to think that it was related to the Kmart (a U.S. discount chain that, until the rise of Wal-Mart, had set the standard for inexpensive shopping experiences) advertising gimmick called blue light specials, for which Kmart would discount already discounted goods.

The music in “The Blue Light” (as it is in “Tinsel Town Rebellion”) is superb. It starts with a fantastic rock groove that segues into a tight backing track for Zappa’s spoken-word thesis.

“Tinsel Town Rebellion” is not only the title song but the thesis. A savage critique of the state of the U.S. music scene, Zappa argues (in a simple and straightforward manner, which should indicate the seriousness) that punk and new wave are merely fads. Zappa was clear about his disdain for punk, arguing in Telos magazine, “I am glad that someone sneaks in there and makes a mockery of the business. But how much of a mockery is it if they wind up being sold and distributed by the same business they intend to mock.” 26 _Of

course, the fact that Zappa had once been able to get away with this kind of thing (certainly Freak Out! and We’re Only in It for the Money were attempts to subvert the system by using the system) makes his critique of punk fairly acid. Musically, it is a pretty fantastic song, one that was the antithesis of punk (and inevitably part of the joke). It features manically fast changes, quota- tions from other songs (on Tinsel Town the band quotes Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” the “Theme from the Tonight Show, ” and the theme from

I Love Lucy. Later bands would quote “Light My Fire” (the Doors), “Whip

It” (Devo), “I Write the Songs,” (Barry Manilow), theme from The Twilight

Zone, “Rock You Like a Hurricane” (Scorpions), and “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya”

(Culture Club). 27 _{The band’s ability gives lie to the truth of punk. Zappa’s}

dislike of punk seems to have as much to do with the punk aesthetic (that bad / sloppy is somehow virtuous) as it does with the relationship between punk and commercialism. His disdain for new wave seems to come from a different place; the fact that bands were being signed largely based upon a look was anathema to Zappa. It would be a thesis he would explore in years to come.

The fi nal two original songs on the album both return to the theme of women. “Pick Me, I’m Clean” comes from something Zappa overheard a

French fan tell one of the band members (in an attempt to get him to take her back to the hotel). This is just the kind of absurdity Zappa seemed to love. The song becomes a list of the different arguments this woman might make in order to meet the band. The song, set to a catchy, major-chord romp, is an interesting piece. The pure journalism / sociology of the song makes it interesting as a snapshot of life on the road. It certainly should lead one to ask the question “why do these women do these things,” but that is a ques- tion Zappa is never interested in asking. The fact that they do, and that they should not be judged for doing so, is what interests and concerns Zappa. The song then, starting at around 2:08, becomes another vehicle for extended soloing that, because the solo was actually part of the recorded song (and not a xenochronos mash up), is very interesting and expressive.

The fi nal original song on the albums is “Bamboozled by Love,” a stan-