# The Zappa Reviews: 1 - Freak Out! (1966) [Part 1]



## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

(Note: This article is split into two parts owing to TC's character-per-post limit)

In early 1966, the story goes, a man from Verve Records by the name of Tom Wilson walked into a club in Los Angeles, California, to hear a band called The Mothers. He was pestered into going there by the group's manager Herb Cohen. Wilson showed up at the place, not particularly interested, and walked in to hear the band in the middle of a fairly typical boogie number, a requisite of the bar band repertoire of the time, designed to put feet on the dancefloor, cash in tills, and drinks in hands, if it worked the owner of the club might let them play again no matter how bad they were. After that came _Trouble Every Day_, a song about the Watts Riots presented in a kind of walking-beat blues resplendent with harmonica and so forth. Soon enough a deal was worked out to make a record on the understanding that it would be a Paul Butterfield kind of affair, but when they got to the studio, the first song they recorded was _Who Are the Brain Police?_, full of churning guttural guitar fuzz, arrhythmic percussion, people making weird noises, and lyrics reflecting a detached and paranoid view of society. Wilson got on the phone to his boss, and said, "uh... you remember those guys I found in L.A., like another Blues Project? Well..."

Soon enough people were slipping shiny black vinyl discs out of covers featuring odd looking gentlemen and speech bubbles commanding them to "Freak Out!"; were putting needles down on wide grooved smooth edges and hearing that reliable crackle, which unlike for us was not a staccato ushering in of warm nostalgia for a time they never knew, but business as usual. Not business as usual, it turns out, is having someone, to a very catchy beat, **** all over your existence as an American citizen in the 1960s; telling you about people you never realised existed, who were doing things you never thought possible, who were rejecting the "great Midwestern hardware store philosophy," the "supermarket dream," and turning their backs to it as it had them.

It is here we encounter The Mothers (of Invention, as necessitated by certain informed Verve execs who believed "mothers" was - in the parlance of the time - short for "motherf***ers") as infiltrators, first of the record business and then of the unsuspecting well-to-do 1960s teenager's bedroom, the occupant of which was now hearing for the first time about a kind of counter-culture that was fated to cause a rupture in modern American life, and perhaps identifying with the lyrical content that dealt with feelings of alienation and abandonment; of anger at authority figures; of resentment towards the picket-fence values of the 1950s that lingered in the air; of fear at the impending doom of the draft that was going to take them, break them, and ship them off to some country they never heard of, where people they didn't know were fighting a war they didn't understand. But The Mothers, as former member Jimmy Carl Black would later recall, were not a protest band, they eschewed the values of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, anti-war band Country Joe and the Fish, and others, instead opting, as would be Zappa's signature form of satire for the rest of his career, for the documenting of facts as they saw them and incorporating them into songs which made no prescription for how to fix the ills of society - they weren't pretentious enough for that - instead saying "here's a situation, does it sound a lot like your own life?"

Zappa later said in interviews that he believed in revolution through infiltration, and it seems that The Mothers and _Freak Out!_ were a real example of this idea in action, infiltrating ears, operating on the inside via suggestion and satire. To no avail: the album peaked at #130 on the Billboard charts; critics, such as Pete Johnson, wrote scathing reviews: "not content to record just two sides of musical gibberish, the MOI devote four full sides to their type of 'artistry.' If anyone owns this album, perhaps he can tell me what in hell is going on." Most people did not understand what they were hearing, neither lyrically nor musically, but somewhere out there, a core of sympathetic ears formed in the United States and across the ocean in Europe, where Zappa would become both a favourite of the progressive left and a symbol of freedom in the face of the Soviet Union, in which his records were illegal and had to be smuggled across national borders to be played at secret gatherings in basements under the cover of darkness.

_Who Are the Brain Police?_ forms an interesting thematic triptych with the song that precedes it, _I Ain't Got No Heart_, and a much later song, _Help, I'm a Rock_. Zappa was an admirer of the painter Hieronymus Bosch, who completed several triptychs including _The Garden of Earthly Delights_, and this link, while absolutely frivolous padding of a most egregious nature, might go some way to explaining the many examples throughout Zappa's career of things occurring in threes. The "rock opera" trilogy of _200 Motels_, _Joe's Garage _(itself a triple LP), and _Thing-Fish_ (also a triple LP); the triple LP _Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar_; the career spanning _Lumpy Gravy_ trilogy: _Lumpy Gravy_, _We're Only In It for the Money_, and _Civilization Phaze III_ (originally titled _Lumpy Gravy Phase III_); others besides. This sidetrack aside, the end of _I Ain't Got No Heart_ features a sudden excerpt from _Who Are the Brain Police?_, the same excerpt is heard later in _Help, I'm a Rock_. The first occurrence of this excerpt serves two purposes: establishes a thematic link with the other two songs; introduces the next song in a brash, confident manner, leaving the audience thinking "what the hell was that?" And when the song ends they get to find out just what the hell _that_ was. It's a set-up and a punchline, and perhaps for the first time avant-garde music and dadaist structural humour found their way on to a pop record, introduced sneakily but suddenly, infiltrating the ears of pop music consumers.

Lyrically speaking, these three songs may appear to have nothing to do with each other at first glance, but I think they address most directly the core issues explored throughout the album, and do so in a kind of narrative, a prime example of an overarching concept being applied to a pop album. They show a progression from isolation to paranoia, finally to a desire to escape. First of all, the narrator has rejected love. He has, perhaps following on from situations similar to those described in the many love songs scattered throughout the record, shut himself off from the possibility of relationships, describing himself sitting and laughing at "fools in love", of not believing in love. From there we take the logical step of entering a socially detached state, in which one is free to avoid direct contact and merely observe. The narrator begins to see people as constructs of plastic and chromium, synthetic, shiny, but questions what happens when that veneer falls away, perhaps under the pressure of an emotionally heated moment, a stress it cannot tolerate. He conjures a grotesque image of melting plastic, foreshadowing in some way the direction horror movies were to take over the next twenty years, and is recalled in scenes from such splatter classics as 1982's _The Thing_, 1986's _The Fly_, and 1988's_ The Blob_, all ultraviolent remakes of the kind of B-movies Zappa himself adored. The narrator goes on to ask the titular question: who are the brain police? Or: who enforces the wearing of these synthetic shells? In _Help, I'm a Rock_, the narrator finally comes to see himself as an emotionless, well... rock. He yearns for more, an escape from the hole he has dug for himself, and decides to become a policeman. It's a crucial satirical moment in the album's thematic progression: a man with sociopathic traits makes his way into law enforcement. In the final stage of this progression he decides he'd rather be the mayor, leading conceptually into _Brown Shoes Don't Make It_, the story of City Hall Fred, a pederast politician, which would be created in the following year for The Mothers' second album _Absolutely Free_.

On the original LP version of _Freak Out!_, _Help, I'm a Rock_ is "a suite in three movements," consisting of _Okay to Tap Dance_ / _In memoriam, Edgard Varèse _/ _It Can't Happen Here_. In the later CD releases it was split into two tracks: the suite's namesake and the final movement. Musically _It Can't Happen Here_, with its absurdist mock doo-*** a capella (Zappa actually calls it a barbershop quartet in the gatefold's liner notes), seems like it comes out from under the surface of the album to wash away everything that has come before it. "All those love songs? ********!" it says, with swagger and irreverent flair. Swiping not so much at the lyrical content, but the musical, a direct assault on the pop stylings of the first two sides. It leads into the final side, a single track titled _Return of the Son of Monster Magnet - _here come the B-movies again.


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