Mother Bobo

God bless Instant Karma at the Earth House, but I payed way too much for Zappa records in high school. Cruisin' With Ruben and the Jets cost me $45 alone. I keep the price tag on the protective sleeve as a badge of honor...of sorts.

But lately I've been practically stealing rare Zappa titles. A couple months ago it was a near mint copy of Freak Out! (original Verve inserts and all) at Looney Tunes for something like $15. Today, it was Mothermania for $9.99 at the Record Exchange. It was unpriced and the fella got the owner on the horn for a pricing. I know my poker face is pretty shitty so when he gave that price, I nearly bit my tongue off trying not to cry out in joy.

Brought it home. The vinyl has exactly two skips. One at the beginning of "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" and the beginning of "Hungry Freaks, Daddy." The latter blows because that song has such great momentum and the mix on this album is way brighter than on Freak Out! Hasn't stopped me from listening to it in its entirety twice already. It's a great album for a best of. It's the only where FZ actually picked the sequencing and some of the mixes are better than the original versions. Thus making it highly sought after.

Also saw that the cat that owned it before me had his way with the gatefold and inner groove. Even though this permanently keeps the album in only the tens of dollars, it makes it probably the most badass copy of Mothermania I've ever come across. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mother Bobo-

I'm kinda OK with this.

Side note- if I ever have a record store, I may called it Wicked Out of Print. Eventually called Wicked in due time. Even my fantasies have fantasies.

Ode To The Box

I didn't make a lot of hullabaloo on this blog when it happened...

but let me reiterate...

I'm so fucking happy I own the Box.

It's bigger than I thought, shinier than I thought, and a lot more re-mastered than I thought.

It's always gonna be right there on my shelf. It's always gonna be cool. It's always gonna show me how to do the Pachuco Stomp or do a Jelly Roll. It's always gonna show me how to play doo-wop progressions in C then go into "Charva." It's always gonna have a Freak Out! that sounds better than the first pressing I bought last week.

It's gonna continually convince me that I live in 1985.

Some guys get notes from their girlfriends saying how they love them and stuff. I'm gonna always have a note from Frank telling me I'm a crazy person but he's thankful for that.

I've gone off the deep end and there's no way I'm swimming to the shallow end.

Fuck relationships, I have the fucking Box.

Mrs. Jenkins Turned Him Green

Recently I've been intrigued by one of Zappa's oddest LPs, Francesco Zappa. I actually found it in the MassArt library in the classical LP section and was kinda blown away by that. It is a compilation of two opuses by Italian composer and cellist Francesco Zappa (yes he is real) who flourished around 1763-1788. The music was found by Frank Zappa in the 1980s at UC Berkley and performed by the Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Consort (aka Zappa on the Synclavier II).

Zappa's Synclavier work was criticized, both then and now, for being too "cold" and lacking "human touch." This is true to some end since Zappa never really used warm tones with the Synclavier in any of his work- even in the highly advanced Civilization Phase III. The coldness in FZ can be found with the hard-to-identify instrumentation (except the really good harpsichord synth) and the lack of intonation.

However, this detachment works to the album's advantage due to Frank Zappa's distaste for court music (hilariously explained in David Ocker's liner notes). Using his line of thinking, a composer can sadly be removed from his own work if he has to write it to please a hierarchy of society. Francesco Zappa was the court composer for the Duke of York right before Europe was swept with the spirit and terror of the French Revolution so he too must have felt this emotional detachment from his work.

Another note on the digital orchestration- it's fun. It's almost goofy. It sounds like early computer game music. This was most likely an aesthetic choice by Frank Zappa. The two biggest clues to this is the silly (but brilliant) Donald Roller Wilson cover and the collage on the back cover that contains a sign reading "UMRK DIGITAL BAROQUE AMUSEMENT FACTORY." Frank argued through his career that his music was for entertainment and amusement and "should not be confused with any other form of artistic expression." (from the liner notes of The Perfect Stranger) Francesco's music was for the amusement of the European elite. Frank Zappa takes the music, puts it into the musical aesthetic of the 1980s, and makes it for the amusement of everyone. You can say a lot about Frank, but you can't say his stuff isn't amusing.