Whither Uncle Meat?
Whither Uncle Meat?
Life… is a work in progress. Contemplate, if you will, this cover art,
as I listen to the two-cd album “Uncle Meat”. I just wanted to put this
weird album cover on my livejournal today. So if Lumpy Gravy was the
germ of everything that followed, this could be the sprout. This was
originally supposed to be the soundtrack for a movie that fz was trying
to make, but it was never actually released except later as a home
video. I read a description that said that it was mostly home video
quality bits with the Mothers of Invention and really not worth chasing
down. The album that came out of it, however, is a cornerstone of avant
garde jazz, rock & contemporary music. Oh, did I mention xylophone?
We are visited again by Suzy Creamcheese, and she tells a bit of what
she’s been up to. Suzy actually has quite a bit of time to talk at
various parts of the album. There are some nice live snippets that
include things like “Louie, Louie” being used to abuse the pipe organ at
the Royal Albert Hall, God Bless America on Kazoo at the
Whiskey-a-Go-Go, lots of crazy jazzy saxophone by Ian Underwood, Jimmy
Carl Black holding forth on the benefits of working three months before
taking a break compared to working one month and then taking a break.
Some of this is what Bela Bartok might have created if he had electric
guitars and such. One of the oddest tracks for me was “Dog Breath, The
Year of the Plague’ which is the first version I’ve heard yet of a tune
that I know as”Peaches en Regalia”. Many of the idee fixe of
the rest of his career first appeared in this album. This version is
unique in that it has some rather odd lyrics. This was a sort of
manifesto for fz. On the second disk, some of the actual movie including
dialog is sampled. We get to hear Frank talk about the power of music as
an influence on the young. He says: “we really need a hit single. Just
think, i mean the way the world is going today , with all tythe problems
in it , I bet I could really change the world. because it’s the young
people who really, need to be changed. You could really do that through
music. this was our last single, it was really a bomb. they wouldnt even
play it on the radio. Oh well, gotta comeup with something better than
that.” This is a very young Frank Zappa, and it seems so un-Zappa, to
me, that he seems so sincerely disappointed in not having material
success. There’s a pretty twisted part in the movie excerpt about Suzy
Creamcheese beating actor Aynesly Dunbar with a toilet brush and how
Aynesly is into whips and canes. Remember: It’s 1968. Now THAT
is kinky.