The vinyl grading scale is an endless source of fascination to me. Sometime long ago there must’ve been a particularly ballsy vinyl dealer who decided that a record that is borderline unplayable ought to be graded as “Good”. Even “Very Good” is not all that great; “decent” starts at “Very Good Plus”. If a record gets run through a wood chipper and somehow still resembles a circular shape you can at least slap a “Fair” on it. God help you if you ever find something marked “Poor”.
A long time ago I got a copy of Uncle Meat that I thought might fit that description. The seams were entirely split, and both inserts were mangled beyond recognition, so if you weren’t holding it tightly both LPs would just fall right out. It is an extraordinarily ugly object, particularly since this is Uncle Meat we’re talking about; Zappa, for most of his career, reveled in album covers that just looked grotesque. The price tag was four dollars but I am pretty sure I just got it for free; it was one of those please just get this shit out of my store records. Amusingly not the only Zappa LP I’ve gotten this way.
The records themselves looked pretty rough (this picture doesn’t really do it justice, because I don’t know how to photograph things) but you really never know; how a record looks and how a record sounds can often be completely different. A lot of surface noise isn’t visible; sometimes scratches don’t actually make any noise. After running them through an ultrasonic cleaner, these two LPs played…surprisingly okay. First side was somewhat crackly but the other three actually sounded mostly clean. Looking at the listings of this pressing any decent copy would run ya $50+; the ones below that might look even worse than mine. Getting one for free suddenly seems like a steal. Though it’s Zappa so I suppose you do pay with your brain cells.
When I first read about Zappa it was on a webpage that began thusly: “Frank Zappa was a man who simply could not shut the fuck up.” It compared going through his catalogue as reading the entire works of Tolstoy; you don’t wanna do it, but if you’re a serious music guy you know that one day you should. I don’t really like that comparison though. To me it’s maybe more like watching all 30 seasons of South Park; surely there is at least one good joke in every episode but spending a lot of your free time on it will likely just make you hate yourself and the world around you. I don’t think there’s a single Zappa album out there completely without merit (okay, maybe Thing-Fish), but even the good ones tend to be grating somehow. Like hanging out with a 9-year old who spends an hour asking you “interesting” questions about stop signs and football stadiums. Either you spend all your brainpower trying to give earnest answers or you glide through it with this sensation like somebody drumming on top of your head.
Suffice to say Frank Zappa is not someone you get into casually. Start with the wrong album and you’ll hate his guts. Start with the right album and you may end up wasting a lot of time, thereby hating his guts the long way. People always seem to recommend We’re Only in it For the Money or Hot Rats as a way in but I’m afraid that if you liked them you’d wind up more enthusiastic about delving into his catalogue than you ought to be. Money is not only way sharper than Zappa usually is, it also features a lot of great short songs that he hasn’t really done since. Hot Rats is famously one of his only albums where he does shut the fuck up.
Nah, if someone wants to get into Zappa, it’s Uncle Meat all the way. It’s one of his better albums, almost certainly somewhere in the Top 10, but this one gives you a good idea of what to expect should you want to delve deeper. It’s got the bloated, incoherent tracklisting, with studio cuts laying next to live ones, and tracks that are supposed to go together shuffled throughout the LP. It’s got that loose sense of thematic unity, full of melodies that show up several times, or reference one of his previous albums. There’s a bunch of dialogue which doesn’t have much to do with anything; there’s one track about how Ian Underwood joined the band, one where a band member complains that they aren’t making enough money, and one that talks about how Zappa gets to have sex all the time. And if you get the CD version, you’re rewarded with an extra 40 minutes of this shit. It’s got several whacked out, weirdly short pop songs (of which “Sleeping in a Jar” has got to be the most notable), incredibly sarcastic and dumb live covers of “Louie Louie” and “God Bless America”, and a number of tracks which sound like Zappa put a sped up ensemble piece over a totally unrelated backing track – one of which (“Project X”) always stuns me by somehow sounding just like “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer.
And it’s got moments of brilliance. Maybe more than just moments. ”King Kong”, which takes up all of Side 4, is a fast-paced instrumental fusion jam which just rips, going through six different variations, all recorded in different places with different people. Perhaps the sonics of the piece leaves something to be desired, unless the Family Feud buzzer sound provokes some kind of ASMR response in you. Most importantly it is the reward for sitting through the first three sides, which contains a lot of music I actually like, but still frustrates with it’s inability to display any cohesiveness or get into any sort of groove whatsoever. Some of the more melodic moments are wonderful – “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” is one of Zappa’s best tunes ever I reckon – but you only get 2 1/2 minutes before it devolves into a gauntlet of atonal slapping.
Don’t get me wrong; I like this stuff. Somewhat. Putting “Nine Types of Industrial Pollution” up front I think is an inspired move; it is six minutes of layered percussion over a sped-up guitar solo, so formless there is really no melody there at all, and yet there’s something undeniably intriguing about it. Everything in it just tickles your eardrum, and by extension your brainstem, which tends to get overloaded by all the chaos. You know those AI-generated videos that present you with a bunch of 80%-recognizable images at once, so your brain never really gets a grasp on what exactly it’s looking at? That’s how a lot of this music comes off. So much of it comes off slightly out of tune (“The Uncle Meat Variations”), with chords that just do not sound like they’re pitched right, but just as soon as your head starts to scramble he’ll pull a real melody out of the aether. I think a lot of this is because some of the tapes sound like they’re sped up somewhere between 20% and 50%. You couldn’t exactly apply pitch correction software back then. So it just ends up sounding…like this.
Zappa gets the sole songwriting credit for the vast majority of this (basically, everything but “Louie Louie” and “God Bless America”), but I think the rest of the band deserves a lot too. Who knows to what extent Frank was controlling the solos and improved bits, but to me the soul of the album lies with Ian Underwood, who plays organ, piano, flute, clarinet, sax, and a dozen other things, and both Artie Tripp and Ruth Komanoff (who’d later marry Underwood), who play all that tuned percussion which you hear all over the place on this album. Whatever Frank’s vision was for this album, these are the people who I think really kept it alive and somewhat respectable. There are a bunch of other names listed on the LP as well – the original Mothers are all on here, as are people with names like “Bunk Gardner”…but it’s difficult to tell what exactly any of them are doing. It’s all Zappa music in the end. I don’t think there was any grand vision involved. For certain pieces yes, but as a whole? No way. Had he mixed this on a different day the album might’ve come out a lot different.
The idea of circumstance comes to mind a lot when listening to Zappa albums; so much of what you hear on them seems to come down to who showed up on a certain day, or what the recording equipment actually captured, or what mood Frank himself was in while recording it. I do find the loose conceptual unity behind his work to sometimes be frustrating – the man seemed incapable of envisioning much beyond “what goes on in the life of Frank Zappa”, and whenever he does, it’s generally some of the stupidest ideas you’ve ever heard in your life. This was intended as a soundtrack to a film which was never finished, a film which comprised primarily of fictionalized accounts of various things that happened to the band in 1968. Mostly weird experiences with groupies. He actually did complete a movie a few years later called 200 Motels and it was more or less the same thing. But I guess you’d be a fool to expect anything else out of the man. You only write what you know, and Frank Zappa knew Frank Zappa. Someone had to.
And so it only seems appropriate to hang onto a copy which is actively falling apart, a copy which you only ended up with because someone else just wanted it gone. It’s one of the most aesthetically unpleasing things in my collection, but it comes from a man who viewed the world as a giant garbage can, so maybe that’s how it’s meant to be. Sometimes garbage can be good. Maybe even Very Good.
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