Frank Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American musician, songwriter, composer, record producer, actor and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works, and produced almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He was a highly productive and prolific artist and gained widespread critical acclaim. He had some commercial success, particularly in Europe, and worked as an independent artist for most of his career. He also remains a major influence on musicians and composers. Zappa was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. (More from Wikipedia)
U. S. Senate hearings were held in 1985 about supposedly offensive song lyrics, where Twisted Sister lead singer Dee Snider and Frank Zappa (among others) testified. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek TV movie about the controversy called Warning: Parental Advisory came out in 2002; it was created by VH1 and was directed by Mark Waters. In one scene, appearing as himself, Dee Snider clomps into the Senate chambers in full Twisted Sister regalia to testify.
(June 2013/2)
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Allmusic states the musical and historical importance of Ptooff! well in their entry by Dave Thompson: "Talk today about Britain's psychedelic psyxties, and it's the light whimsy of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, the gentle introspection of the Village Green Kinks, Sgt. Pepper, and 'My White Bicycle' [by Tomorrow] which hog the headlines. People have forgotten there was an underbelly as well, a seething mass of discontent and rancor which would eventually produce the likes of Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, and the Edgar Broughton Band. . . .
"But the deranged psilocybic rewrite of 'Gloria' which opens the album, 'I'm Coming Home', still sets a frightening scene, a world in which Top 40 pop itself is horribly skewed, and the sound of the Deviants grinding out their misshapen R&B classics is the last sound you will hear. Move on to 'Garbage', and though the Deviants' debt to both period [Frank] Zappa and [the] Fugs is unmistakable, still there's a purity to the paranoia.
"Ptooff! was conceived at a time when there genuinely was a generation gap, and hippies were a legitimate target for any right-wing bully boy with a policeman's hat and a truncheon. IT and Oz, the two underground magazines which did most to support the Deviants ([Mick] Farren wrote for both), were both publicly busted during the band's lifespan, and that fear permeates this disc; fear, and vicious defiance."
After taking several years off from making music, Mick Farren resurfaced in 1978 with a brilliant solo album, Vampires Stole My Lunch Money. The album opens with what might be the best cover of a Frank Zappa song by anybody: "Trouble Coming Every Day", a seething litany of what's wrong with the world that could surely have come straight from Farren's pen.
Kim Fowley was a hustler first and foremost and would be a contender with James Brown as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, at least among those (mostly) working behind the scenes. The Sun Herald obituary noted: "[Kim Fowley] went on to write or produce songs for a range of musicians, including the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Gene Vincent, Helen Reddy, and Warren Zevon" – but the article could just as easily have listed a different half-dozen prominent names.
(January 2015/1)
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Anyway, the music is the hard part when doing psychedelic rock; for many would-be psychedelic rock bands, just about any lyrics will do, and the stranger the better. I was planning to come up with some examples of those lyrics, but they were a little scarce on the Internet. However, this excerpt from the Allmusic review by Todd Kristel of the Pebbles, Volume 3 LP actually does a better job of describing the songs than the lyrics themselves would:
"This compilation features Higher Elevation's 'The Diamond Mine', a showcase for the nonsense rambling of disc jockey Dave Diamond; Teddy & the Patches' 'Suzy Creamcheese', which manages to rip off both Frank Zappa and 'Louie Louie'; Crystal Chandlier's 'Suicidal Flowers', which sounds like the Doors drenched in fuzz guitar; William Penn Fyve's 'Swami', which is such a self-conscious attempt to evoke 1967 that it's hard to believe it was actually released that year; Jefferson Handkerchief's 'I'm Allergic to Flowers', which was presumably intended as a novelty song; Calico Wall's 'Flight Reaction', a fascinating acid-damaged glimpse into the mind of a passenger who's sitting in an airplane before takeoff and worrying about a possible crash; the Hogs' (allegedly the Chocolate Watchband under a different name) 'Loose Lip Sync Ship', which consists of an instrumental passage that mutates into Zappa-influenced weirdness; the Driving Stupid's 'The Reality of (Air) Fried Borsk' and 'Horror Asparagus Stories', which feature precisely the kind of grounded lyrics that you'd expect; the Third Bardo's 'Five Years Ahead of My Time', a genuinely good number even though it doesn't sound five minutes ahead of its time; [and] the Bees' 'Voices Green and Purple', which made the Nuggets Box Set along with the Third Bardo song . . . "
(July 2015)
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