Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar by Frank Zappa (1981)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library
Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar by Frank Zappa (1981)
Well, now, the Excel spreadsheet lobbed up a bit of a softball with this one. I feel pretty qualified to discuss Zappa’s music. Little known fact: I almost did some serious Zappa music scholarship in my last couple years of college. I couldn’t get any research money, though. (It was kinda tough to convince the board of science and business profs why it was necessary work. I didn’t really blame them, though. I really just wanted to get my hands on some Zappa Cds and scores.) So, I tossed the idea out the window.
So, this is a box set of three separate albums called
Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar, Shut Up n’ Play Yer Guitar Some More, and
Return of the Son of Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar. As you can imagine, it’s a lot of guitar solos culled from live concerts. But here’s the catch: a lot of these performances never “happened.” How’s that, you say?
Well, Zappa had this idea for a compositional technique he called xenochrony, or “foreign time.” The idea was to take the live solo guitar tracks from one performance and juxtapose them with the rhythm tracks from a completely different performance of a different song. It’s certainly an avant-garde methodology, but I must admit, it’s all a little bit lost on me.
Here’s why: Zappa’s soloing is weird enough by itself, even over the “right” accompaniment. I’ve read plenty of interviews in which he talked about guitar soloing and how his goal was to stay far away from the standard practices in rock soloing- pentatonic box shapes, tossed-off blues-based licks, and simple eighth-note and sixteenth-note rhythms. And of course, one listen to any of the tracks in this box and it’s obvious that he pulled that unconventional style off in spades.
It’s seemingly uncontrolled madness, truly improvisational insanity. He fires off blast after blast of stream-of-consciousness, scalar runs in arrhythmic time. Sometimes playing off a theme. He’s a total original on that pick-it fence. But dare I say it? A little of this soloing goes a long way for me. The tracks on these discs can very easily blend into one giant, noodling song for me. It starts to all sound the same after awhile. I would equate it to listening to someone reading Faulkner at high speeds.
I’m a guitar player. I can certainly appreciate the things he’s doing on these albums. Just the man’s electric guitar
tone alone is unique, but I’m really more of a fan of how Zappa
organized sound into tight arrangements, unnatural-yet-controlled rhythmic gymnastics, and crazy harmonic progressions. And of course the freedom of improvisation like this would be a very cool feeling. But unlike his agonized-over studio compositions, there is a certain
deconstruction at work in the music on these discs, usually meandering solos over static harmonies, (which is how he preferred to solo live, apart from the xenochronous ideas.) My favorite track isn’t a solo at all, but an improvised modal duet with him on bazouki and Jean-Luc Ponty on baritone violin.
So, I wind up with the tired old argument: technique vs. “musicality,” as if the two are mutually exclusive. To tell you the truth, I stopped being blown away by guitar soloing a long time ago. The me of my junior high years would have probably loved guitar playing served up on a silver platter like this. And it’s not like this is Yngwie Malmsteen neo-classical, “technique-for-it’s-own-sake”-type stuff that was just dying out during my junior high days. I don’t want to create that impression of this music. These sounds are utterly unique. “Challenging” would be a good word for this.
But this is not the FZ music that really thrilled and thrills my soul. (Probably not my “soul.” More like my “head.”)
Whatcha' Readin'?
I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately. I recently finished
If Grace is True-Why God Will Save Every Person, by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland. It’s pretty controversial stuff, being about universal salvation and thus the role of scripture and experience, but a very interesting read. But I think this book is pretty much as subversive as you allow it to be.
After that I read
What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills, not nearly as eye-opening as the former, but raises an interesting question to me, did Jesus come from the Essene tradition? Wills is a Greek language scholar and some of his Scriptural translations were very interesting and fresh sounding.
And finally, I just yesterday finished Anderson Cooper’s
Dispatches from the Edge. Man, what a sad, sad book about the Sri Lankan tsunami, Iraq war, and hurricane Katrina- all events that Cooper has covered for CNN. I don’t envy him for his job at all even though he says he
needs the constant displacement. I had no idea about the pain in his life. I was thankful that he didn’t try to tidy up these horrible events and images into a nice, neat little package where all of the suffering suddenly makes sense. That would have been sickeningly trite.
Up next, I’ll finally read
A New Kind of Christian by Mclaren for my small group and a book called
Father Joe, on recommendation by Lance.
Car Caught Fire by The Bears (2001)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library
Car Caught Fire by The Bears (2001)
Well, I’ve got the time, why not another randomized CD commentary? Today, the Excel spreadsheet spit out the number 25-
Car Caught Fire by The Bears, which was quite fortuitous, since I happen to have the CD up here at work. For those of you not in the know-The Bears is the band that Adrian Belew works with when he’s not doing solo stuff or King Crimson stuff. To grossly generalize, The Bears’ music is a little bit closer to straight-ahead pop than the other music associated with Adrian. More on that in a sec.
As far as this album, about half of it-I love! The other half, I’m kind of “enh” about. As I was looking through the liner notes, I realized that the songs I’m crazy about are the ones written by either Belew or Rob Fetters.
The second song, “Under the Volcano,” sounds like what 80s music was supposed to do- Rob’s voice is just so…haunting, singing this really long melody of sustaining notes over a busy little arpeggiated clean guitar line. His voice reminds me of the bass player from Blink 182, (not the whiny punk-rock voice, the other one.)
Another highlight is Adrian’s “Mr. Bonaparte,” a little more aggressive and angular than the last one, but still really catchy and very appropriate production choices for the choruses: a distant voice singing “I live in my lonely mind,” with a lot of room reverb around it. It really does sound like a lone voice crying out.
Right now I’m listening to a song called “Dave,” the “sad song” on the album, featuring a typical sustain-ey guitar solo by Crimson founding member Robert Fripp.
The last song I really love on this disc is “117 Valley Drive”- an up-tempo song about youthful, early days of playing music in the backyard. This song has some nice delineation of parts by Belew and Fetters trading off lead vocals. Another nice trick is a shift of feel in the drums in the chorus as well as faster harmonic motion in the guitar chords. Takes it to another level.
I think I’ve probably talked about how influential King Crimson was in my musical aesthetic development and an offshoot of that was an appreciation for the talents of Adrian Belew, both in his role as KC frontman and on his solo albums. Adrian is able to hold two seemingly contradictory elements together. On one hand, he is a maker of strange, avant-garde guitar noises and play-er of difficult “heady” music. For an example of this, one need look no further than KC’s album
Discipline. On the other hand, he is a crafter of beautiful, mostly Beatle-esque melodies with a lot of soul in them, (see the album
Salad Days- an album of some of his best songs in mostly acoustic form.) He is exactly the kind of musician I aspire to be.
Plus, he seems like a nice, regular guy, who just happens to have been a professional musician working with some big names like David Bowie, Trent Reznor and Frank Zappa for over thirty years.
***APB---if I have loaned you my copy of Adrian Belew’s CD called
Inner Revolution, please let me know. I have been mourning the loss of it. As you were.***
My Grandpaw
My grandpaw is in his early 80s. I think he said he’s 83. He’s a skinny bean- has been for my whole life. My grandpaw was in D-day. He was a paratrooper over St. Mere Eglise. Have you ever seen the movie
The Longest Day? It’s an awesome black and white movie about D-day with John Wayne in a supporting role, as well as young versions of Richard Burton and Sean Connery and a bunch of other guys who were famous at the time.
My grandpaw has always reminded me of John Wayne. He’s got those beady kind of eyes and the same kind of croaking voice. When my grandpaw was parachuting into that little town in France, (it’s the town where the church is on fire in the movie), he got shot and shrapnel flew into his eye. He wound up getting an eye transplant. For my whole life, my grandpaw has had a woman’s eye.
I also remember the rare times that we would visit my grandparents growing up, there was one time when my oldest brother and I snuck into Grandpaw’s bedroom when no one was around and he quietly opened the dark laminated armoire doors and showed me Grandpaw’s purple heart, in a box, wrapped up in a cloth. It was something he never talked about and I wondered how my brother Mark found out about it. There has always been an air of whispering, childhood mystery surrounding my Grandpaw’s purple heart.
Grandpaw has always had a sense of humor about life. He’s never been one for etiquette or social conventions, never taken things too seriously. Yesterday, he told me a sense of humor is one of the most important things you can have as you get to be old. I spent the weekend listening to him and Grandmaw tell stories about their lives, about their parents’ deciding to give farming a try in the middle of the depression, even though they had very little experience with it. They told me about how hard life was, about how they literally built a house after working all day at their jobs and trying to keep two young kids occupied at the same time. They told me about how the three houses that they have built in their lives are still standing and occupied.
But the following is one of the funniest things I’ve heard Grandpaw say:
“You know I’m still hunting for that German-the one who shot me in the war. Every time I meet a German who’s around my age, I ask him if he’s the guy. They always say the same thing-‘Russian front. I was in the Russian front!’”“I’m still hunting for him.”
Venue Songs by They Might Be Giants (2005)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library
Venue Songs by They Might Be Giants (2005)
So, it’s been a long time since I’ve written. I’ve been busy at work.
But I was getting a little bit wistful for the schtick where I have Excel tell me what to write about. And today, Excel spit out #593, which just so happens to be the CD/DVD combo of
Venue Songs by They Might Be Giants.
Here’s the premise: the two guys in TMBG challenged themselves to write a new song for every venue that they played at while on tour and perform them, at the respective concert. This CD has a live recording of the songs as well as fancy studio recordings of some of the better ones. The DVD features videos for the best songs and a few extra videos previously unissued in this format, (my favorite of which is “Some Crazy Bastard Wants to Hit Me.”) Also, there’s a nice role for John “I’m a PC,” Hodgmon as The Deranged Millionaire.
The highlights for this collection for me are: “The Garage” from Glasgow, (just try to get that chorus out of your head), the two House of Blues songs and “The Egg.” At least those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
If you’ve read much of this blog, you probably know that TMBG are a mega-musical influence for me. Grandpa Griffith could become a TMBG cover band at any time and I’d probably still be content. But with that said, something about the Johns’ output over the last two or three years has lost its’ luster for me.
Of course, this is pretty much all subjective, but their music has become a little bit disposable for me as of late. They still come up with damn good melodies most of the time and they can still create a zany arrangement, but I suspect with more readily-available recording technology at their disposal, they have backed off on their ability to self-edit. What I mean is, when it’s easier to get your songs in a fixed, final recording, it’s probably tempting to call everything that you put any time or energy into a masterwork.
The reason I bring up technology at all is that I can hear in their last couple albums more fancy digital bells and whistles and an overall compressed sheen that seems to have taken some of the “life” out of the sounds. This all makes me suspect that they have Pro Tools set-ups at home to noodle with.
Anyway, this is not to demonize Pro Tools, (the last Grandpa Griffith album was done on Pro Tools), or to diss the Johns. It’s just that I’ve heard much better from them in the past.
But then there’s the raw
idea behind Venue Songs. They basically imposed limits and structure on themselves to
help the creative process. This is a pretty grand idea and seems antithetical to Romantic notions of liberated art and it’s not the first time they’ve done it—
Here Come the ABC’s and Dial-a-Song…To me, they are exploring a modern-day version of what J.S. Bach did way back in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s, with his groups of organized compositions. I’m thinking in particular of
The Art of the Fugue and
The Well-Tempered Clavier, where he wrote a group of pieces employing all the major and minor keys, as well as his systematic creation of church music. I think it takes a particular kind of personality to draw inspiration in this kind of way. I think the more traditional view of an “artist” is one who creates order out of chaos, or even
creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. We tend to think of artists as free spirits, who are liberated and act from flights of fancy.
But the Johns and Bach are dealing with a different type of situation, where you have creation from an already existing order or structure. This, to me, seems more like art from the “head” than from the “heart.”
I’m not about to place a value judgment on which is the better method.
And I’m spent.
New Orleans Video
Hey, everybody, if you’re curious about my recent New Orleans trip from about a month ago--my friend Josh Mccullock has a great video documentary up on his website. Go
here. On the splash page in tiny print, it says “New Orleans folks click here.”
He is a sickeningly talented individual. Take a look at his photos while you’re on there.
Be prepared to cry at the earthy beauty of it all.
In the Way of the Musical Revolution
You know, my babies…I dig music. I don’t think that’s any secret. But I was reading
this article about a 40-something’s interpretation of the Top 40 Music chart and I got to thinking about my tastes. I can’t say I’ve heard a single song or artist he names in the article, (other than Soft Cell.) For someone who loves music as much as I think I do, I was reminded how un-“with-it” I am with modern music.
Now, I’ve never found much interest in what’s “on the charts.” The Top 40 doesn’t really mean anything to me. But I’m kind of stuck, musically, right now. Not too long ago, I stopped reading uber-hipster music reviews on Pitchfork Media because they were irrelevant to me. But at the other end of the spectrum, the supposed “music of the masses” chronicled by the Top 40…it’s irrelevant to me as well.
I’m so uncool and old these days. The only dinosaurs less in touch than I am, are Grandmothers listening to their records and eight-tracks. Popular music is passing me by. It just seems like a string of flavors-of-the-day, solo “Artists,” (more like
opportunists if you ask me), with no history and most likely no future. Although, that assumption isn’t based on empirical evidence. Like I said, I’ve never
heard any of it. It just seems way too hard to keep track. The next big thing is long forgotten before I have a chance to hear it.
I’m old.
A CD Held Hostage
After holding it hostage for about a year or two, my friend finally gave me back my Ben Folds
Rockin’ the Suburbs CD. Man, what a great album! I’ve missed you, little fella.
This one just barely nudges out
Whatever and Ever Amen as my favorite Ben Folds album. There’s a lot to like. The melodies soar. He is in the direct line of polished pop songwriters like The Beatles, Burt Bacharach, and The Carpenters. (I have a feeling it’s the piano. The layout of the piano probably tends to inspire more heady harmonies than the guitar, which is just a replacement for a penis, isn’t it?) Anyway, the production is pretty grand, with all kinds of Pro Tools subtleties, multi-tracked vocals and interesting keyboard sounds. I think Ben Folds has the ability to create brilliant arrangements that keep an easily bored listener like myself engaged. Just his back-up vocals alone are more sophisticated than 90% of the tripe you hear anywhere else.
The man is gifted.
