We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago…..
I think there were two important and memorable pieces of media in my adolescence that formed my interest in books and music and the cutting edges that both could reach. One was the book ‘Ball Four” by major league pitcher Jim Bouton, a behind the curtain look at a major league baseball team and the sport itself “warts and all”. It taught me how to swear like a champion… I know, I know, its bad taste and vulgar but what can you do. The second was the discovery of the 1971 LP “Frank Zappa & The Mothers Live at the Fillmore”. This album, along with excellent playing by a crack crew of musicians, is also vulgar, crude and sophomoric filled with satire on the rock & roll mystique. Led by Frank and also the duo of Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, aka Flo & Eddie, (aka the voices of The Turtles) who released some other crude & vulgar (do you sense a theme here) satirical LPs later in the 70’s…
The humor is a hit & miss proposition. Sometimes funny, sometimes cringe-worthy. The extended story of the Mud Shark, based on a true story of rock & roll debauchery on the road, is entertaining. Some of the musical offerings, “Little House I Used to Live in” and “Peaches en Regalia” are interesting. Aynsley Dunbar’s drumming and Ian Underwood’s keyboards stand out. But, it was the scatalogical humor of the record that drove a generation of adolescent boys to buy the album…and usually play it at low volume when their mothers were home.
Zappa, of course, was a musical genius although he would have never used the word. And it’s interesting that he would be willing to put out this stuff under his name…just, in my opinion, to poke the musical establishment in the eye.
I personally came to admire his later 70’s work more than this…although at the time…we all had the lines memorized…..”Hookah…Oink, Oink,” indeed.
Not safe for work if you want to listen…use some headphones…you’ve been warned.
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