Weasels Ripped My Flesh [Original recording remastered]

This was meant to be a sampler for that album, and possibly functions as a best of for a set that never existed. The material is wild, varied, and powerful. "Oh No" and it's segue into "Orange County Lumber Truck" may be one of the best chunks of music Zappa ever put down onto tape. "My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama" is biting guitar work, and the final "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" is simply three minutes of painful feedback, followed by ecstatic applause, which just goes to show where the audience's heads were back then.

The cd presentation is very good - the sound is very clear, balanced, and hasn't been mucked with. A great listen.

The opener, DIDJA GET ANY ONYA?, sets the tone for the whole album. A raucous, spontaneous experimental piece that contains some fantastic nasal sax playing (Underwood's special talent), and some vocal adlibbing by Lowell. It slips, with some humor, into a cover of DIRECTLY FROM MY HEART TO YOU, which features a great solo by Sugarcane, who also contributes the vocals. PRELUDE TO THE AFTERNOON... is a mockup of Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, though it doesn't quote it at any moment. The intent seems to mutate the idea into perverse improvised theatre, the type of which is recreated by FZ and Roy Estrada on-stage on the Baby Snakes film.

TOADS OF THE SHORT FOREST is a split piece, with a beautiful composed portion recorded in studio, and a heavy live portion that features several members of the band playing in different signatures, per Zappa's obsession with "rhythmical textures" in this period. GET A LITTLE is a short, wah solo set to a simple lounge beat. Not an inspired solo on Zappa's part, although the tempo and FZ's playing are pretty suggestive, especially when one considers the title.

The ERIC DOLPHY MEMORIAL BARBECUE is one of my favorite Zappa tunes of all time. I don't know where the reviewer who makes vague accusations of plaigarism got the idea that anything in it is borrowed. I've been an Eric Dolphy fan longer than I've been a Zappa fan, and, frankly, I've never seen a tremendous amount of similarities between them. I've always assumed the title refers to the extended phrases that cover several registers, something I'd asssociate with Dolphy. Certainly, I've never heared this kind of use of polyrhythms on a Dolphy record. The cramped spacial quality of Zappa's pieces are in perfect contrast to a lot of Dolphy's work, which took on an almost Eastern or minimalist approach in his later work. I'd like to know what *exactly* the accuser believes to have been ripped off from Dolphy. The title was a little ironic, if anything. But, moving on, the next number, DWARF NEBULA PROCESSIONAL MARCH & DWARF NEBULA is a studio track, the first a composed little romp reminiscient of the first part of Toads. The rest is tape noises, sped, looped, distorted, you name it.

In case you were worried that there wasn't any easily accessible material on this album, three polished studio tracks follow. MY GUITAR WANTS TO KILL YOUR MAMA, a great mock hard rock number that had a pretty funkish counterpart (see YCDToSA5, the only studio track in the series). OH NO was featured in part on the Lumpy Gravy album, and is here in its full version with the vocals -- one of Zappa's great reoccuring melodies. It leads into the fantastic ORANGE COUNTY LUMBER TRUCK, another reocurring Zappa theme (a great version of it featured on the Roxy album). The closer, in case the rest of the album confused you, clears everything up. Its two minutes of grating distortion noise. Theatre of cruelty, I suppose.

This isn't the place to start with for new fans, who will doubtless be a little put off by the overload of experimental weirdness crammed into this one. But this album is incredible fun, and seasoned FZ listeners will really enjoy exploring this little experimental gem.

[ As for the shot at Zappa's politics, made by the same reviewer who made the strange and unexplained charges of plaigarism, it shouldn't matter at all, save that the dogmatic left (and I speak as a Social Democrat myself) always feels it necessary to conduct these kind of intellectual purity witch hunts in the sphere of art. Its a nauseating desire to subdue all art to its narrow idea of dialectal progress. Zappa wasn't an intellectual -- so what, a lot of artists aren't, and its simply not necessary for the production of meaningful art. Anyone who has read a poem by Rilke, a play by Strindberg, or enjoyed a piece by Mussorgsky knows this. Zappa is simply the most potent expression of cynicism and rebellion against middle-class values of his time. His finding profoundity in the grotesque, his disregard for aesthetics and theories, and his formalistic chameolonism which mocks more than pays tribute, all point to a rebirth of Dadaism in the youth rebellion of his times. Nothing so well expresses the meaning, the raison d'etre, of rock music. And, following logically, this makes Zappa considerably anti-political, and, if anything, an extremist secular libertarian. ]