Frank Zappa
I first listened to Frank Zappa’s music during Rykodisc’s rerelease of Zappa’s entire catalog in 1995. During the rerelease, many of Zappa’s albums were receiving rave reviews from rock critics and I was intrigued enough to purchase We’re Only In It For the Money and Sheik Yerbouti. After first listening to We’re Only In It For the Money my honest reaction was “there goes 12 bucks I’ll never get back again.” It was way out there like nothing I’d ever heard. But Sheik Yerbouti was much more immediately accessible and I found myself enjoying the humor and the rock guitar aspects of the album. So I gave WOIIFTM another chance. And although it is a completely different album than Sheik Yerbouti, I grew to love it. What at first sounded “out there” soon revealed itself to be brilliance. If this was what music could be then I wanted to hear more. Much more. Fortunately for me, Frank Zappa created somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 albums depending on how you count them. I’ve listened to about 35 of them by now and will be sharing my thoughts and reviews periodically in this blog, including an index of them on a web page on this site at http://bobsala.com/frank-zappa which will be listed under the Pages section of my blog.
Index:
Zappa Top 10 lists: top 10 lists of my favorite Zappa albums and albums that best represent his different styles.
Book review: The Real Frank Zappa Book.
Album review: We’re Only in It for the Money
Album review: Cruising With Ruben And The Jets
shawna solito replied:
I enjoyed your paragraph on beginning to listen to Zappa. My brother would play Zappa records for me in the 70’s and I didn’t get it. Some, like Yellow Snow and such were simple enough, but the rest I couldn’t relate.
In 2000 I went back to college to finish a music degree and kind of re-found Zappa. I started with his Yellow Shark CD, all orchestral/instrumental and it is comparable to many of the great 20th century 12-tone composers (schoenberg, webern). Then we bought the Baby Snakes DVD, TONS of music and live video, I love the live video it’s so real (heh). And so wonderfully Frank Strange. At this point we own almost all of his albums (CD’s), I need to go count.
We saw Dweezil in Aug of 07, he was playing his dad’s music and it was right on and well done, the whole band showed incredible musicianship and Dweezil was a very sincere performer.
Great stuff – I will spend my lifetime absorbing it, which makes it even cooler.
shawna
January 13, 2009 1:32 pm at 1:32 pm. Permalink.