Greetings from our new home! I’m thrilled about the update and this post is simply intended to test how it feels to use our new platform.
But since I’ve been having so much fun listening to The Hots Rats Sessions by Frank Zappa, I thought I’d use this test as an excuse to shout it out. Released in 1969, Hot Rats was Zappa’s second release under his own name (rather than under “The Mothers of Invention”). Like Matt Groening , who wrote the liner notes for Sessions, I can still remember where I was when I first heard the amazing drum fills that begin Hot Rats (my friend Neil Sturchio’s house). And like a lot of Zappa’s music, it holds up incredibly well. It is, I believe, one of Zappa’s masterpieces.
The Hots Rats Sessions is for people that know this music inside out and want to find out what else Frank recorded at that time. Answer: tons of great, great music. There are Zappa guitar solos that are so fresh and inventive, it’s simply mind-boggling. There are absolutely stunning jams with Sugarcane Harris on electric violin and gorgeous piano solos performed by Ian Underwood. And, as you listen through the six CDs (!) you can gradually hear Hot Rats take shape.
Enough. I could spend the rest of my life praising Zappa’s music and still not capture its disturbing beauty. Because Frank, of course, is what-ya-call a complicated figure. Zappa had (his term) a repellent personality that indiscriminately expressed contempt for nearly everyone and everything.
So, unconditionally guaranteed, Zappa’s lyrics will surely offend you. And no, what he says about nearly everyone is, well… I’m not going to make any excuses for it. But… I did say he trashed “nearly everyone and everything….” There were two things he never, ever sneered at.
Zappa loved great music, any idiom, any style. And he loved music-making whether it was Boulez’s precision or Don Vliet’s re-enactment of Howlin’ Wolf on Mars. And that deep love of music and music-making comes through in every single note Zappa wrote and recorded.