Welcome to Hackensack
“A City in Motion”
Yet—it remained exactly where I knew to look for it.
(Just saying.)
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)
— Nietzsche
Time for more Henning Paleontology. Back in the late ’70s/early ’8os,
a friend introduced me to Zappa with We’re Only In It For the Money (by then,
already out of print for some while) and One Size Fits All. At or about that time,
Sheik Yerbouti, Tinseltown Rebellion and the first instalment of Joe’s Garage
would be available at record stores, and “Dancin’ Fool” was a big single.
Another friend (of a friend) wound up making me a fan of the Sheik. I don’t
know exactly why I was standoffish towards the Rebellion and the Garage,
but I was. Because I was more interested in finding copies of out-of-print
Mothers titles, I discovered a nearby-ish used record shack somewhere
on Route 23 in New Jersey. I did not find any copies of the first three albums
(which were my especial target) so I “flew blind” leafing through what I did
find. Although I now know that I should not have gone wrong with any of what
they had available, I pored and picked, and wound up taking home Uncle Meat,
Burnt Weenie Sandwich, Hot Rats and Chunga’s Revenge. Collectively they all
opened up my ears good and wide, and thus they have all been great sentimental
favorites of mine ever since. Keeping in mind that what I had already heard of
his work was highly unsystematic, one of the big surprises for me was the Doo-wop
numbers. Another was the dazzling array of instrumentation and the amazing
textures. Of these four, my enthusiasm burnt least hot, perhaps, for Chunga’s
Revenge, but no record with “Transylvania Boogie (more proof that Zappa was the
unequalled poet of the wah-wah pedal) the exquisite insouciance of
“Twenty Small Cigars” and the momentary percussive anarchy
of “The Clap” could be bad. And, as mixed as I might ultimately find
the “comedy music” angle of the Flo & Eddie version of the Mothers, “Road
Ladies” makes a short, punchy case for it. Of these, my first four Zappa
LPs, Hot Rats stands out as being atypically homogeneous. There are no
non-musical comedic elements, and the album plays as consistently
earnest music-making, sort of a precursor to Shut Up ’n’ Play Yer Guitar,
if you will. “Willie the Pimp” was my introduction to Captain Beefheart,
and if his performance
struck me immediately as peculiar, even rather alien, it was also undeniably
visceral. “The Gumbo Variations,” especially “Sugar Cane” Harris’ violin solo,
knocked me base over apex. And I immediately loved the sweetly sculpted
“Little Umbrellas” (with Ian Underwood playing recorder, among other
winds) and “It Must Be a Camel,” miniature masterpieces, both.
The long and the short of it being that the one over-cautious corner
of my subconscious wasn’t fooling anyone: I was certainly going to fetch
in the Hot Rats 50th anniversary “Hot Rats Sessions” box. Today, in case
you
were wondering if some people who are apparently paid for their musical
opinion might not be dense as a sandstorm, I read this on Wikipedia:
“Writing for Rolling Stone, Kory Grow enjoyed the album but thought
that it was flawed, stating that while it was a very interesting listen for
those curious about the making of the album, it could feel like overkill
at certain times.” Grow apparently does not understand the difference
between an album and a collection of musical documents made in the process of creating
the album. Nice work, if you can get it. What a display of underqualification for the task. Moving on ….
Just before actually revisiting Les rats chauds, it dawned on me: just why I am
writing of this experience and of the unprompted recollections this writing process
has caused to resurface (I was half-afraid it’s been something of an exercise in
rationalization): Although I have long enjoyed listening to Zappa’s work, and have comparatively recently enjoyed the “deeper dives” afforded by the lavish releases
from The Vault, I had never before realized how deeply Zappa’s rich musical world
has insinuated itself into my composer’s brain, have not hitherto appreciated
the degree to which ZappaSound (no less than Stravinsky himself & al.) helped
form the rich musical backdrop to my own creative work. And this year, as I find
myself still wrestling with whether my own work actually means anything
in the Universe, I feel that this re-immersion into Frankreich (so to speak) is
a kind of going back to the well.
So, The Sessions has been delivered. The presentation misled me
into supposing that the vinyl version had been sent to me in error.
I soon discovered the mistake, which was mine own.
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