Prepare yourself for one of the most complicated
and interesting stories in the history of modern popular music. In 1967 an
executive from Capitol Records, impressed with The Mothers Of Invention’s first
two albums, approached head Mother Frank Zappa about writing and conducting a
piece of classical music for Capitol Records. The thinking was, if Zappa just
conducted but didn’t play on the album he would not be in violation of his
existing recording contract with MGM Records. This was extremely optimistic
thinking on their part and presaged a professional life marked by almost
constant lawsuits for Zappa. But I get ahead of myself. Back in 1967, Zappa
took the challenge and wrote a complicated, dense, brilliant, highly listenable
piece of modern classical music. He entered Capitol’s studios with a group of
over 30 of the finest jazz, classical and session musicians in Los Angeles (dubbed
“Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra and Chorus”) and in short order recorded and edited the music down to about 23
minutes of masterpiece. It is arguably the greatest piece ever realized by
Zappa. It has so many signature Zappa moments - wild leaps of time ala John
Cage, matterhorns of percussion inspired by his hero Edgard Varese, jazzy interludes,
soundtrack music for films never made - all edited together by Zappa with his
patented disregard for standard measures of song. It simply flows from idea to
idea, yet it all feels wonderfully a part of some cosmic whole. Capitol
released it as a promotional 4-track tape to reviewers and industry insiders
and were, of course, immediately slapped with a cease and desist order from MGM
Records. (Now you want to talk about a REAL collectible - something the top
Zappa collectors in the world drool over -that original 4-track tape is RARE!
Hardly any of them exist and it is next to impossible to find.) So, to avoid a
protracted lawsuit, Zappa takes the tapes of his masterwork and begins to
reassemble them into a new and different work. He edits in some surf music,
sound effects and the results of an experiment he conducted whereby various
friends (including Eric Clapton and Tim Buckley) stuck their heads inside a
piano and spoke closely enough to the strings that they vibrated in a strange
and sympathetic way. Different parts of these weird, echo-y recordings would
appear on Zappa records until the end of his life, but this is their first and
most effective use. The new, re-edited version is released to the world in 1968
as Lumpy Gravy, while the original classical
piece becomes the subject of rumor and desire.
Throughout the years, I have found Lumpy Gravy to be the most interesting and confounding of all Zappa releases.
Re-edited, his original work is wildly audacious. He changed it from a
classical piece with avant-garde leanings to an avant-garde suite that nods to
classical. It is no less great. Lumpy
Gravy stands alongside the most
ambitious albums produced in the 1960’s in any genre. As it was released in
1968, it makes perfect sense in the arc of Zappa’s career; it is a completely
weird exercise in musique concrète,
but with a hip edge brought by the spoken word parts, which link the album
clearly to the first Mothers Of Invention releases. In a strange way, the legal
restraint of the original classical piece may have saved Zappa’s career (such
as it was). If that primal composition had been given wide release, it might
have been too confusing for the record buying public and in some way changed
the course Zappa took moving forward. He was forced to recast the music in a
more Mothers-friendly fashion, and thus, though the album is still incredibly
weird, it fits in with other releases of the day.
Why have I expended so much ink discussing a
project you can’t hear? Well, thanks to the Zappa family archives you can hear
it now. With the release of Lumpy Money
we can now hear that original piece, alongside hours of other Lumpy
Gravy and We’re Only In It For The Money related materials from the sessions.
In addition to that groundbreaking original classical piece, there are hard to
find mixes of both albums, interviews, live cuts, extra session work - it is
literally a treasure trove of prime-era Zappa goods. I believe this release is
the most essential purchase in the entire Zappa catalog (now numbering 103 official
releases). It shows Zappa as a completely self-possessed artist at only 26. He
had vaulting ambition and, unbelievably, the talent and drive to see his vision
come to reality (twice in this case). If however, this seems like too much to
digest at once, I suggest just picking up Lumpy
Gravy. It has much of what makes Frank Zappa great in the rock and roll
universe, but it also shows very clearly why he simultaneously ruled other
universes at the same time. He was, quite simply a one-of-a-kind musical genius
with no peer, and Lumpy Gravy is ample proof.
-
Paul
Epstein
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