Freak Out!
Freak Out!
The first entry in the Zappathon is the 1966 “Freak Out!” 
As I listened to this album, I was struck, “This is 40 years old!!” I
didn’t sit there with a notebook in hand making notes about particular
songs, so here come some random impressions.. “Who are the Brain
Police?” is possibly the most enduring song on the album; at least it
still seems relevant today. In an interview by a Dutch radio station, FZ
mentions this song years later because of Amerikan laws which attempted
to make certain thoughts criminal. He was referring to regulations
attempting to make the producers of 2LiveCrew culpable for the violent
acts committed by their listeners. Of course, “hate crimes” are another
example where we have attempted to make thoughts a relevant
part of a criminal prosecution: if you burn a house, it’s not as bad as
if you burned a house because you hate homosexuals (or blacks.. or
people of middle-eastern ethnic extraction.. or .. ) There are several
songs which are emblematic of a Zappa trend: take a contemporary music
form (say, do-wop love songs) and turn them on their head with different
content (say, a song about how much the singer is happy that a
relationship is over, as in “Cry on Someone Else’s Shoulder”). This
being 1966, rock and roll hadn’t yet been mangled by the “summer of
love”, with all the changes that that entailed. The world seemed a much
different place before and after 9/11, and the pop music world
experienced a similar “will never be the same again” effect through the
effects of this cultural anomaly. More about that in a few days when I
review “We’re only in it for the Money”. Zappa weirdness rears its head
for the first time in the songs “Help, I’m a Rock” and “The Return of
the Son of Monster Magnet”. Of note is that the latter, “The return…” is
over 12 minutes long. Some reviews of this album refer to sides 3 and 4,
so I think this album was originally a double album. Running time is
just over an hour, and 30-minute album sides were almost unheard-of in
the mid 60’s, so this song was almost assuredly all that happened on
that side. Soundalikes: “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” could have been the
Jefferson Airplane. “Motherly Love” could have been the Mommas & the
Poppas (and I can’t help mentioning that this isn’t your father’s
sweety’s love, but rather a pun on the name of Frank’s band’s name, The
Mothers of Invention) Did I mention xylophone yet? Frank Zappa has
probably used the xylophone in his songs more than anyone else in rock
& roll that I can think of. “Wowie Zowie” is the first
blatant example of this, although the xylophone appears in
subtler forms on some of the other songs on this album. Well this wraps
up episode 1 of “67 days of Frank Zappa” Next: Absolutely Free