I first became aware of Frank Zappa as a 14 year old poring over rock encyclopedias - and then seeing some of the strangely titled records in the record shops. I didn't hear any until much later, when, I think, Marc Almond, one of my heroes, included an extract from "Uncle Meat" on a show of his favourite albums. (He also included "Berlin" by Lou Reed which I quickly bought - Zappa would have to wait.) At university, a friend taped me "Hot Rats" which I sort of enjoyed, though it wasn't usually my kind of thing and at some point I picked up CDs of "Uncle Meat" (which I found a little disappointing) and "Cruising with Ruben and the Jets" (which I loved). An older friend was a fan, and when his back catalogue got picked up by Rykodisc I got the two "Cheep Thrills" compilations. All the Zappa I could possibly need....
...then on a trip to Newcastle I picked up the Uncut special on Zappa to read on the train. With a review of every single album, I quickly became aware of how little I had heard...of how much there was. A few albums later - "Bongo Fury", "Roxy and Elsewhere", "Mothers Live at Filmore" - I was surely sated. Then a reissue of his first three albums in a cheap box, oh go on then. At some point I have to admit that I have around 20 Zappa albums. The bits I like - the crazy psychedelia of the early cut up albums, the doo wop pastiches, the over the top guitar wig outs - and the bits I didn't - the frat boy humour, the overly precious jazzy instrumentals, the somewhat proggy tendency of the songs - at some point become merged, sometimes in a single album or single song. Okay, I'm a fan now, I guess. But there's not just these twenty albums, there's another twenty, and another, and another....
Zappa it seems is one of those artists who is a genre to himself. I'd add in Prince, Dylan, Neil Young, Eno, Bowie, George Clinton, Rundgren - probably a few more. Once you start buying them you can't stop. The bad becomes almost as important as the good....
I remember Malcolm Cowley on William Faulkner writing that his best work wasn't a particular novel but the "whole" of the saga, or individual scenes or stories - probably a necessary statement given his choosing of extracts for the "Portable Faulkner". Few writers are at a quality throughout their life - there is apprentice work, there are sidetracks, there is hack work. I recently hovered over an unmade F. Scott Fitzgerald film script in a secondhand bookshop before realising it wouldn't add anything to my knowledge of Fitzerald (I've two different versions of the "The Last Tycoon.") Whereas a novel tends to be a complete work its often not as simple as that. Early versions of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", "Sons and Lovers", and "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" have been published for instance - there are two versions of two of my favourite novels, "Tender is the Night" and "A Clockwork Orange." The "best" novel of the 20th century according to one poll, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz was initially a much shorter work published in a magazine. Are multiple volume books like "The Lord of the Rings" or the Patrick Melrose novels single or multiple works?
What I think is interesting is that even as we look for the "perfect" work - the Stone Roses debut, or "Blade Runner" or "The Life Times of Michael K" - the artist is only accidentally responsible for this. Artists like Neil Young, Frank Zappa and Prince didn't just record an "album" but compiled one from different tracks. Young's recent "Hitchhiker" was an album of acoustic demos from the early 1970s which has seen most of its tracks released over the years in different versions on different albums. There are tracks on the last album of Pixies' original incarnation which appeared on their original "purple tape" sent as a demo to 4AD records. Even David Bowie - who would often go into the studio with nothing written - would resurrect a 1973 song for the "Scary Monsters" track "Scream like a Baby" - and "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic", a number one for the Police, was from a Sting demo that had long lain unrecorded.
Going to an art gallery, I'm often interested in career retrospectives. Over the years some of my favourite shows have been like this - Basquiat, Hannah Hoch, Jackson Pollock, Tove Janssen have all been career spanning shows that have absolutely fascinated me with the progress of their work. Much as we can talk about art without talking about the artist and their life (and the times in which they live), the art is often enhanced by an understanding of the circumstance of its making.
Back to Zappa, I think he'd pretty much stopped releasing proper albums around the time I got into music (his hit single "Valley Girl" from "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch"), and what would come next would be a range of curated albums - taking old live tapes and manipulating in the studio. Since he died we've had one of the most comprehensive reissue programmes ever. Certainly collections like "Lather" (which was stripped apart for 3 albums in the late 70s) and the recent expanded "Uncle Meat" are worthwhile additions to the canon; they feel like the have the imprimatur of the artist, even though he has left. Yet though we are all interested in posthumous releases by artists we love - such as Prince and Bowie and Amy Winehouse - the posthumous releases are rarely an embarassment of riches.
Now, where can I get a cheap copy of Zappa's "Jazz from Hell".....
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