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Absolutely Free

Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention - Absolutely Free Audio CD

A fair review of the Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention "Absolutely Free" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention reviews here, or go back to the Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention tabs.

Band: Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention
Title: Absolutely Free
Rating:

Release Date: 1995-05-02
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Plastic People 2: Duke of Prunes 3: Amnesia Vivace 4: Duke Regains His Chops 5: Call Any Vegetable 6: Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin 7: Soft-Sell Conclusion 8: Big Leg Emma [*] 9: Why Don'tcha Do Me Right? [*] 10: America Drinks 11: Status Back Baby 12: Uncle Bernie's Farm 13: Son of Suzy Creamcheese 14: Brown Shoes Don't Make It 15: America Drinks and Goes Home

M.O.I. 2nd album
The wait dulled my expectations somewhat, as I was very curious to hear Zappa's compositions after his great first album "Freak Out!". When I received this CD, it was defective and I had to return it for a refund and order from somewhere else. The social satire on this album is much more direct and biting than his first. "Plastic People" satirizes exactly those persons in the title. What I enjoyed most of all was the rather off the wall departure into the Duke of Prunes and Call Any Vegetable - a later Flo and Eddie band concert favorite. The special bonus track "Big Leg Emma" is nice clean straight-forward R&B. The remaining tracks I will leave to the listener to discover. Although this is good album, I don't feel it quite rates up to "Freak Out!" and certainly not anywhere close to "We're Only In It For the Money". However, it does show Zappa's maturity as a composer. His technical and editing skill will flourish in his first great masterpiece "We're Only in IT for the Money". This is an album for any Zappa fanatic, and a must for undertsnading his philosophy and ideals when it comes to "we're only in it. . " I recommend all three, if you wush to hear Frank at some of his satirical best social commentary.

Zappa, part the second...
It's also an album I rarely played, and I wasn't really sure why. This is the 2nd album in the Zappa universe, and it's just as good as its predecessor, Freak Out! (one of the best debut albums in rock history). But that has changed lately, and the more I play it, the more I dig it. It's a shatteringly complex, infinitely listenable album that is actually more cohesive than Freak Out and many of the tracks have stood the test of time. Many of these pieces made it onto later albums in full orchestra glory (like The Duke of Prunes on the Orchestral Favorites album).

The opener, Plastic People, still rings true, and the next few songs (The Duke of Prunes, Amnesia Vivace, and The Duke Regains His Chops) make up a complex mini-suite. Zappa would have probably been more at home composing classical music than rock, but he never got any official musicial training when he was younger (he was poor and hated school), so he managed to make the Mothers of Invention his "orchestra", so to speak. The music is intrinicately arranged, and always surprises. I love Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin, one of Zappa's most interesting and tuneful instrumentals. The classic America Drinks and Goes Marching (which also appeared in a jazz version on King Kong, a collaberation with Jean-Luc Ponty) is also here, and so is one of Zappa's bonafide classics, Brown Shoes Don't Make It. While I may be the only person in the world who likes the Tinsel Town Rebellion version, I like the original too. The song is still hysterical and holds up very well, despite being 40 years old. Zappa was never explicitly political on his early works, which is one of the reasons his satiric lyrics still hold true. In the late 80's, he got explicit with his politics (specifically on his Broadway the Hard Way album), and that album is dated. Absolutely Free isn't. It's one of Zappa's best albums, a worthy successor to Freak Out!, and an album that is as fresh today as it was then. .

I'll never forget what's her name.
Then in Jr. I remember I thought the Beatles were "neat" when I was in later grade school. High my minister's younger brother made a fortunate error and left Surrealistic Pillow and the Doors first album behind and the minister let me listen to them while visiting with my parents. I was hooked! So then I decided to risk buying something that looked really wild and bought Absolutely Free as a freshman. I put it on my little record player and was immediately disappointed. What was this stuff!?. I gritted my teeth to think of all that hay baling money going to waste. So there I sit pouting about my wasted cash when the gorgeous friend of my big sister (a knock out cheer-leading junior) picks up the album as she walks by and says "This is cool! Do you dig Zappa Mike?" (I am thunderstruck that she is willing to address me by name and so of course I have to tell her the truth) "Yeah! Yeah, I really dig Zappa" She smiled and then left and I immediately re-listened to the album with a new curiosity. By the time I got through "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" I discovered that these guys are really talented and I'm loving the funny, clever lyrics. I still enjoy this album as a ground-breaking rock classic. .

Absolutely Priceless
Fast, repetitive music with a bunch of sped up voices, it didn't really grab me then, though part of that could have been due to my crappy little no-fidelity wall mounted 1967 record player, and the song taken out of context of the original album. My first exposure to Frank Zappa was a release of "Flower Punk" on an early Mothers anthology.

Shortly after, I heard tracks from Absolutely Free, and it was love at first listen. This was largely because of the Stravinsky, whose ballets "The Firebird", "Petrushka" and "Rite of Spring" I'd been listening to religiously, wondering if I was the only weirdo who loved both that and Cream, The Who, Led Zeppelin, etc. Apparently not: I heard snippets from ALL THREE of those Stravinsky ballets in the songs Status Back Baby and The Duke of Prunes. And for a bonus, there was the excerpt from Holst's The Planets (which I'd grown up on) right before the instrumental of Call Any Vegetable.

I realized, this guy is serious. . . . and fooling people everywhere into believing he isn't. I became a rabid fan on the spot.

Here in the age of what David Bowie might call "Tap Water" music, it's hard to appreciate the impact and significance of these early (1965-67) Mothers recordings. Indeed, it's amazing they even got financed, recorded and released. It was just a very different time, and some very tuned-in persons of influence realized there were people who NEEDED to hear this stuff, both because it had something to say and because no one else was saying it in such a shatteringly original and determinedly crafted manner. Yes, Plastic People, the opening track, sounds sloppy and badly sung at first listen; later, you realize the changes and time-shifts were unheard of in rock, though not that unusual in jazz or theatre. On repeated listenings, one further realizes the overall theatricality of the album, right through the opus Brown Shoes Don't Make It, a blistering work in both composition and social comment. The sense of sloppiness is maintained throughout the work (Zappa's options of musicians at the time were limited), but the keen craftsmanship applied somehow overcomes it. That, and the whole irreverent, satirical, who-gives-a-smurf attitude which became a trademark of this early work. . . . and endured in later servings.

Yes, it's a bit dated; there are references to people, places (Pandora's Box?) and long gone cultural ideosyncracies that mean nothing to most people now. But as a second studio outing by the man who would become the Igor Stravinsky/Spike Jones of rock, take it in directions no one else would touch, tap into and exploit the unique talents of people he worked with and make people like me realize it was not only okay, but genuinely COOL, to like more than one kind of music. . . . Absolutely Free stands as its own classification of masterpiece. Warts and all.

Music history was never this fun!.

Zappa Rocks!
That is because We're Only in it For the Money is. I can't say Absolutely Free is the best Mothers album. Otherwise, you can't do any better!.

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