Frank Zappa

There's a few gems, Hot Rats is great, and I have a huge soft spot for Weasel's Ripped My Flesh for personal reasons, but there is a huge amount of indulgent clever-clever but soulless noodling and way too many Zappa songs with lyrics that appear to have been written by Jay from the Inbetweeners working with Beavis and Butthead.
 


BiG said:
Try listening to the Apostrophe album. It’s a good ‘way in’ for the casual listener. Alternatively, there’s an album called (I think) ‘Strictly Commercial’ (a quote from a lyric) which is a compilation of his more… err commercial (duh) tracks. After that try Joes Garage, the next in line of ‘accessible’ stuff, in my opinion. After that you’re on you own.

He’s a pretty impressive guitar player and the musicians he selected are technically brilliant so the live stuff is usually very well played. But not exactly easy listening.
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One of the ones i listened to started off really weird..talking and that..but when it got got you tell that they could play a bit like..the musicianship was there.
 
I heard Freak Out when I was 13 years old. I was hooked.
I have everything Zappa released on vinyl and cd and a lot of stuff he didn't release.
I've seen him umpteen times, firstly with the Grand Wazoo at the Oval (I had a ticket for his show in Newcastle with the 'vaudeville band' a few years before but it was cancelled due to Zappa being attacked and hospitalized at a show at the Rainbow). Even went down to see his concert with the LSO at the Barbican.

His music is a challenge, a puzzle, a maze of conceptual continuity, a joy, and the soundtrack to my life.
His bands were a testing ground for great musicians - 'pretty good musicians' as he called them

Zappa didn't make music to target any audience. He made music to hear what the little dots he wrote down translated into air molecules being disturbed by musicians.

He was a one off.
If you get it, you get it.
If not ... so what?

 
It really isn't worth the effort of wading through hours of guff to find the handful of decent songs.
Most of his stuff sounds like half a dozen musicians, all at once playing different tunes in different times.
 
One of my mates used to play Zappa stuff round his. We had this short lived phase in the late 80s where we’d listen to a lot of old stuff like Floyd, Beatles, Funkadelic, Peter Gabriel, Sly and the Family Stone etc. Zappa was the only music I couldn’t really get away with.
 

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