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Tuesday, November 14, 2006 ( 11/14/2006 03:26:00 PM ) Bill S.  "THAT'S GOOD LOBNA!" – Back when yrs trly was a young & bony, somewhat speed-freaky collegian, I used to bug my dorm mate by regularly playing Mothers of Invention platters on my plastic Sears portable phonograph. My roomie was a sometime guitarist who appreciated the band's garagey musicianship (if not their vocals), but he couldn't get behind their early attempts at jamming. Listening to the group's first recorded full-blown instrumental, "Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin" (from Absolutely Free), I remember him disparagingly saying, "Nicely played. But it doesn't go anywhere."Putting on the recently released Trance-Fusion (Zappa Records), the much delayed final project overseen by Frank Zappa, I found myself remembering my old roommate Marty's words. An instrumental set of a piece with the composer's earlier Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar and Guitar releases, T-F is primarily composed of solos that’ve mainly been taken from 1984/8 concert performances, given their own unique names ("Bowling on Charen," "Gorgo," et al) and left to fend for themselves. With most of these tracks stripped from their original context (one notable exception: opening instrumental "Chunga's Revenge," which had its genesis on one of Zappa's first solo albums), they really don't "go anywhere." I need to be upfront about my bedrock bias here: as a fan, I favor Zappa's early MoI work above everything else he did in the course of his long contrarian career. I love him as (to use Wilson & Alroy's phrase) the Psychedelic Satirist – and have much less use for his later pervy lyrical obsessions – and I equally favor the band he started out with over all the professional sidemen he later corralled to tour with him. What makes the Mothers interesting for me, outside of their sterling garage punk chops, was the way their limitations pushed against Zappa's high-blown aspirations. Too much competence – as with many of Zappa's later working units – and the man's complex compositions start to lose all trace of humanity. I know there are guitar geeks who still worship at the altar of Shut Up Zappa, but I'm just a poor pop nerd who prefers his tunes with a beginning, middle & end, thanx. As a result, the sixteen tracks on this set pretty much blend together about five cuts into the disc. I've played Trance-Fusion several times in the car driving to work in the past week. Each time I found myself listening fairly intently to "Revenge," "Bowling on Charen" (which has lines that sound like they could've come from Burnt Weeny Sandwich, though apparently it's from a 1977 performance of "Wild Love") and "Good Lobna" (Zappa-phile Matt Groening must've been tickled by the Simpsons ref here) – than needing to be goosed back into full attention by a good rhythm shift (as with the snippy "Soul Polka") or a dose of bluesy familiarity ("After Dinner Smoker.") In most cases, the titles don't particularly help: you'd expect, for instance, a song called "Gorgo" to be a full-blown tromper much like "Chunga's Revenge," but you'd be wrong. To be sure, listening to the man's assured fingering can provide slivers of pleasure – even to a musical dunderhead like myself. For years, I've used earlier Zappa guitar collections for background music while writing, and I suspect I'll be pulling out T-F in the future for the same. (As a sonic experience, it's certainly much less intrusive than, f'rinstance, the frequently annoying Sheik Yerbuti.) But when I want to actively listen to the man and his music, I'm still most likely gonna slip on something from the 60's or early 70's. That pumpkin dance track on Free may not "go anywhere." But it's surrounded by the front and back of the original "Call Any Vegetable," which definitely does . . . . # | |
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