COHERENCIA INTERNA EN LOS PEDZE

“Upward and onward to teenage stardom.” 26 _{Absolutely Free (originally released}

on June 27, 1967, on the Verve label; currently available as Rykodisc RCD 10502). Highest Billboard chart position, No. 41. Personnel: Frank Zappa, Ray Collins, Roy Estrada, Jimmy Carl Black, James “Motorhead” Sherwood, Billy Mundi, Don Preston, Bunk Gardner. “If Freak Out! announced the arrival of the Mothers of Invention and their sublimely subversive intentions, Abso- lutely Free was the fulfi llment of those ambitions.” 27

According to Billy James, Absolutely Free was recorded in “am amazingly brief 25 hours over 4 sessions” in and around November 1966. 28 _Technically,

conceptually, and compositionally, this album is a giant leap forward, in part because of two new musicians, Bunk Gardner and Don Preston, both of whom were classically trained and able to execute more of Zappa’s ideas.

The title of the album is open to examination. Neil Slavan reports that Zappa was quoted in the Los Angeles Free Press as saying “We [the Moth- ers] play the new free music, music as absolutely free . . . unencumbered by American cultural suppression.” 29 _{Taken in that vein, the album itself is an}

Among other things, the album calls into question the very idea of songs, especially the idea of the album as a collection of radio-friendly singles; although the Beatles were starting to move in the same direction (and would take a big leap with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band ), there was really no one defying traditional expectations like Zappa was. In many ways, Zappa should be seen as what art and literary critics would call postmodern. Although this is not a book on contemporary music, literary, or critical theory, I think it is important to discuss two particular aspects of postmodernism as they relate to Zappa’s work, especially as it became apparent with Absolutely Free. 30

Zappa does two things with this album that are hallmarks of postmodernism: (1) he quite often quotes other types of music in order both to pay homage to the older forms of music (doo-wop, avant-garde composition, and blues) as well as to point out the exhaustion of originality; and, (2) he calls attention to the very constructedness of the music. From the very beginning, so much of Zappa’s work was purely a studio creation, and many, many overdubs and editorial constructions make the music very much a technical construction and not an organic thing. 31 _{Further discussions of Zappa albums will reveal}

that Zappa was at the forefront of this kind of studio technology.

Zappa subdivides the album into two parts, calling part one “‘Absolutely Free’ (the fi rst in a series of underground oratorios)” and part two “‘The M.O.I. American Pageant’ (the second in a series of underground orato- rios).” An oratorio is a large work for orchestra, vocalists, and ensemble. The purpose of an oratorio is to essay a particularly large theme, and the classical oratorio is one of the oldest forms of sacred music. In calling his works orato- rios, Zappa is both thumbing his nose at the serious nature of music (indeed, an oratorio that uses “Louie Louie” as its primary leitmotif is a serious fi nger in the eye of musical convention) and at the same time calling attention to the fact that this music is serious in its political project.

The fi rst song on the album, “Plastic People,” was written in response to a clash between the police and the Los Angeles street freaks outside of the L.A. restaurant Pandora’s Box. 32 _{In the song, Zappa presents a challeng-}

ing narrative in a complex musical setting that starts with a direct quote of “Louie Louie” and then evolves into a piece of music that changes time signatures at will and moves from spoken word to singing to instrumental breaks. One interesting story about the genesis of “Plastic People” is related by Barry Miles, who claims Zappa wrote the song in response to a number of Los Angeles club owners wanting him to play the kinds of songs that would allow the audience to dance. When he asked one club owner what kind of music this might be, the owner cited “Louie Louie” as a good song. Accord- ing to Miles, “Zappa told the band [the Mothers of Invention], ‘Ok, we’ll give them ‘Louie Louie’ for 45 minutes.’” 33

The lyrics are, as usual, confounding because they refuse to let anyone off the hook. The song starts with a snide reference to President Lyndon Johnson but quickly calls into question the more local events surrounding

the riots. Although the lyrics do call into question the actions of the police, they are also very unsympathetic to the freaks who were there, again arguing that many freaks were not part of the politics but were far more interested in going to the riot in the same way they would go to a movie—that the riots, in Zappa’s opinion, were not a political action but some sort of activity. Zappa writes in the song about “plastic people,” identifying girls who paint their faces with plastic goo and wreck their hair with shampoo as the worst kind of offenders, the kind of people who would “dress for a riot.”

What distinguishes this song, and many of the songs on the album, is the extensive use of spoken-word interludes and commentaries. Not only does Zappa introduce the songs and have others speak while music and singing are happening, he also, at times, comments upon the compositions themselves, at one point telling the listener, “This is the exciting part. . . . It’s like the SUPREMES . . . See the way it builds up / BABY BABY.” This countertex- tual aspect of the album places it squarely in the postmodern. The political project is thus: by calling attention to the very recordedness of the album, 34

Zappa is letting the audience into a world that is all their own; listeners are divided into those who get the jokes (and the ironic stance) and those who do not. This irony was not lost on Zappa (nor was it lost on his various biographers). Although several biographers argue that Zappa should have felt weird or apologetic for creating, in essence, a soundtrack for drug use, Zappa himself simply felt disappointed, telling Frank Kofsky, “it breaks my heart when people don’t dig into [the songs] and see all the levels that I put into them.” 35

The next several pieces on the album, “The Duke of Prunes,” “Amnesia Vivace,” and “The Duke Regains His Chops,” are all part of the same song. This is Zappa at his mocking best. “The Duke of Prunes” begins with a very serious piece of music featuring spacey woodwind sounds and nice, distortion- free, electric guitar. This very serious music is then juxtaposed with com- pletely nonsensical lyrics about the Duke, who intones, very seriously, about “A moonbeam through the prune / In June.” The moonbeam-June rhyme seems to argue, as Zappa would do regularly, about the thorough stupidity of rock lyrics. Band member Ray Collins seems to agree, arguing “Frank had this beautiful tune called ‘And Very True,’ and when we went in to record it . . . I [Collins] just ad libbed on the spot . . . and I changed it to ‘Moonbeam through the prune, in June.’” 36

This same argument continues in the next two parts of the song, contrast- ing the very serious art music with extraordinarily silly lyrics. Zappa does, however, at the beginning of “The Duke Regains His Chops,” take yet another shot at standard fi fties music when he starts chanting “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Prunes” to the music in the melody of fi fties chestnut “Duke of Earl.” Zappa accounts for this lyrical silliness, arguing that his lyrics can be placed into three categories: “some of them [the lyrics] are truly stupid, some are slightly less stupid and a few of them are sort of funny.” 37 _Zappa

was always sort of put out that, in order to get record companies to release his records and radio stations to play them and people to buy them, he had to write songs that at least had a nodding acquaintance with the conventions of popular music, and this meant lyrics. In many interviews as well as in his autobiography, Zappa argued that the only reason he wrote lyrics to most of his songs (he does admit to liking the snide political stuff) was that “we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant.” 38

Contrary to Zappa’s own statement, however, comes the next two songs, “Call Any Vegetable” and “Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pump- kin.” Although the lyrics to “Call Any Vegetable” are indeed nonsensical, beginning with “This is a song about vegetables / They keep you regular” and featuring some fi ne yodeling by singer Ray Collins, the music is intensely melodic, featuring some incredible soprano sax work by Bunk Gardner. The song leads into a seven-minute blues vamp featuring some fi ne guitar and saxophone soloing, much of it recorded live and in one or two takes. Gard- ner relates that “the band was really cooking” in the studio and that he was pleased with his solo. 39 _{It really is, upon repeated listenings, an incredible}

tune. As fi ne an example of extended progressive rock soloing as exists, it also features a neat quote from the Holst tone poem “The Planets,” neither the fi rst nor the last time Zappa would directly quote classical composers. 40

Side one of the album ends with the song “Soft-Sell Conclusion,” which continues the argument begun on Freak Out! about the dangers of adver- tising. Spoken and sung over a standard rock beat (it features some of the fullest chords that Zappa, who was not really known as a rhythm guitarist, would ever play), the lyrics begin with a spoken-word section that sounds just like an advertising pitch; this one happens to argue that one will be a better, more fulfi lled person if one only calls and talks to the vegetable of his or her choice. The song ends with an increasingly frantic salesperson / televangelist rant about vegetables and organized religion, two of Zappa’s favorite themes.

The second side of the album again offers a song cycle instead of individual tunes. 41 _{The side begins with “America Drinks,” a satire of the kinds of music}

Zappa played in lounge bands, including Joe Perrino and the Mellow Tones, which Zappa describes as “sit on the stool, strum four chords to a bar . . . one twist number per night, don’t turn it up. All that kind of crap.” 42 _Beginning

with Zappa counting off the band with “One two, buckle my shoe” and the hi-hat keeping a standard burlesque beat, the song, as might be expected, quickly derivates into weirdness, with different vocalists offering their takes on the sort of hipster jazz scatting; this then evolves into a singer doing a true faux-jazz / beat-type vocalization. The irony here, of course, is that the lyrics are of the stupid variety as described previously, so although the music itself is interesting, the lyrics include “With your fast car / And your class ring . . . I fell for the whole thing” variety. Even though the song only lasts 1:53, it sets the tone for the entire second half of the album: the variety of musical

settings and the fairly free movement between classical, rock, jazz, and R&B genres would take up the rest of the album.

Even though “America Drinks” features another stab and antilove lyrics, the next song on the album, “Status Back Baby,” is a direct attack on high school and the traditions of the American teen. Musically, it is one of Zappa’s songs that wear the time (1966–67) most consciously; it features a melody and instrumentation that would not sound out of place on a Sonny and Cher record. 43 _{Ironically upbeat and featuring a wonderful wandering soprano sax}

line in background, the song is really an attack on the social status games that high school students play. The song is the fi rst appearance (although there are many allusions to this character on Freak Out! ) of one of the great stock characters in Zappa’s writing: the popular, white, male high school star. “Status Back Baby” concerns the trials and tribulations of the typical American high school stud: “Everyone in town knows I’m a hand-some football star / I sing & dance & spray my hair and drive a shiny car.” This stereotypical character would show up repeatedly in Zappa’s work, most famously in the song “Bobby Brown”; it indicates both Zappa’s delight in tweaking tradition and status (what could be more ephemeral and, in the long run, meaning- less than any sort of high school popularity) as well as a revulsion with the kinds of traditions that high school seems to reinforce. 44 _{The song eventually}

breaks down, as many of Zappa’s songs of this era do, into a sort of acid / jam freak-out music (all the better to dance to) and then, just when it is beyond reclamation, segues into “Uncle Bernie’s Farm.”

According to Ben Watson, “Uncle Bernie’s Farm” “attacks the war toys that are promoted at Christmas and compares authority and parents to robot simulacra.” 45 _{Certainly beginning the song with a drunken quote of “White}

Christmas,” the most successful (and thus, in capitalist terms, most popular) song in U.S. popular music, does not hurt this thesis. The song also harkens back to the beginning of the album, referring to parents and politicians as plastic. Further, the verse about the father is impressive in what it can convey in a short space. Zappa writes, “There’s a doll that looks like daddy . . . / Push a button & ask for money / there’s a dollar in his hand.” This is truly indicative of the sense of suburban alienation that would dominate U.S. pop- ular culture in the coming decades; the complete absence of parents from the lives of children that is only hinted at in Zappa’s work will become, by the eighties, simply a given.

“Son of Suzy Creamcheese” not only revisits the famous character of the same name who was featured on Freak Out! but also adds a layer of satire to the already satirical notion of the good girl gone bad / groupie Suzy. The music reminds me intensely of the music played during a lot of television shows of the late sixties and early seventies (and mimicked so successfully as segues in the Austin Powers fi lms), specifi cally Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and Love, American Style. In a lot of ways, the musical setting of “Son of Suzy Creamcheese” is critiquing the point to which pop and rock music had been

co-opted by other, more popular, and more banal forms of entertainment. The lyrics only reinforce this idea.

The fi rst we hear of Suzy Creamcheese is as a character in “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” when Zappa asks, “Suzy Creamcheese, honey? What’s got into you?” This, of course, is an easy-to-decipher double entendre that, although probably pretty risqué for 1966, seems kind of juvenile today. Regardless, between the time of the fi rst and second albums, Zappa invented a much more well-rounded mythology for Suzy Creamcheese, including let- ters from her to the Los Angeles Free Press in which she tried to explain the band. 46 _{Her return on Absolutely Free shows the kind of progress that Zappa}

envisioned for the naive girl from Salt Lake City: she is into acid (“Blew your mind on too much Kool Aid”), is a thief (“Took my stash and left me lonely”), and is known by the cops (“Heard The Heat knows where you are”). Unfortunately, Zappa knew this kind of person; he was surrounded for much of his professional life by people who had started as naive and perhaps well-intentioned folks but who had, after coming to Los Angeles and enter- ing the freak scene, been transformed. In many ways, this reinforces Zappa’s argument that there were only a few true freaks, and Zappa refers to one of them, Vito, later in the same song (Vito was Vito Paulekas, an old freak and one of the folks who seemed a central part of the Los Angeles freak / hippie scene). 47 _{Suzy, in many ways, seems representative of the poseur, the fake}

hippie wannabe.

Zappa’s disgust and delight with groupies is another manifestation of this same ideology that girls should not have to be groupies. I am not sure he wrote about groupies in a misogynist manner; I feel that his real enemy was sloth, and that for many of these girls being a groupie was an easier route to supposed success than putting in the hard work of being in a band. 48

The last we see of Suzy in the song is that she has gone to Berkeley to pro- test marching Styrofoam. Again, this is a thinly veiled attack on what Zappa thought was the hypocrisy of the hippie movement; Berkley, the home of the free-speech movement was also home, Zappa felt, to a gigantic wave of false hippiedom (so false it was made out of Styrofoam). It would be a theme he would return to on his next album.

The album’s masterpiece follows. The 7:30 miniopus “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” is social commentary at its most arch and satire at its most deadly. The song begins as dirty blues, galloping along at breakneck speed. Although the music will change a number of times during the piece, it stays fairly rooted in basic blues. The song was diffi cult to record and perform and is a fi ne example of Zappa the progressive rocker.

At its heart, “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” is about Zappa’s favorite sub- ject: the conformist bent in U.S. culture. The song starts with the narrator urging Americans to “shine up your shoes and cut your hair” and to quit school and go to work. This ideal—that education is for the elite and work is virtuous—is important to remember in any discussion of Zappa’s ideology; he

has discussed a number of times how useless he feels education is, especially secondary and postsecondary education, and his workaholic attitude makes clear that he sought both comfort and virtue in the surprisingly Calvinist attitude he brought toward his professional life.

Halfway through the song, however, it changes rather dramatically from a critique of youth and youth culture 49 _{to a much more savage critique of white}

male hegemony. Soon, after a chugging bridge that urges the listener to “be a jerk, go to work,” we meet another of Zappa’s satirical characters, old City Hall Fred. In many ways Fred is the personifi cation of the privileged white male predator: obviously some sort of city offi cial (“A world of secret hun- gers, perverting the men who make your laws”), Fred spends valuable work time thinking up ways to sexually molest his 13-year-old girlfriend. While his wife is out of town at a fl ower show, Fred is “rocking and rolling and acting