"Who could imagine that they would Freak Out?"

On sixty years of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's debut by someone who has listened to little else by him or them

Nineteen sixty-six was a big year in music, a quickening of the growth and maturation in pop music, a movement that I would argue began when the Beatles came to America in February 1964. It now being sixty years since that momentous year, there’s been a chance to newly take stock of Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde. In a little over a month’s time, there will be a chance to do so as well for Revolver. On June 27, there will also be a chance to fete the 60th anniversary of the release of Freak Out!, the debut of the Mothers of Invention.

While I would never consider myself a Frank Zappa disciple (or even overly knowledgeable of his work), Freak Out! has long fascinated me and been a deep favourite of mine. Satire and the avant-garde collide with infectious pop and sophisticated song craft. A lot of territory is covered in its hour of music, and almost all of it is exhilarating and exciting. It is one of the masterworks of the late sixties and a stunning introduction to the world of Zappa.

The below essay tells of my impressions of the album and I hope you enjoy it, and that you will also share your thoughts on 60 years of Freak Out!.

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“Who could imagine that they would Freak Out?”
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Let’s start with some chronology, shall we? Within 12 weeks in 1966, five albums were released that marked that year as the one when rock music put on its big-boy pants to stay. May 16 brought the Beach Boys at the San Diego Zoo with Pet Sounds while August 5 unleashed Revolver, 11 cuts only in the States but with the multiplicity of Beatles from Klaus Voorman’s pen on the cover. June 19 had Bob Dylan in a pea coat and two LPs worth of Blonde on Blonde as well as the Rolling Stones all looking characteristically sullen and slightly blurry on Aftermath; like Revolver, just 11 cuts for its American version.

A week later came another double album. Put the needle down and be greeted by fuzz guitar and a tambourine. An immediate provocation. Another follows. “Mister America, walk on by / your schools that do not teach.” In addition to the expected backing of guitars—both electric and bass—and drums, there’s a vibraphone and a tympani and an exaggerated vocal glissando of the song’s title, “hungry freaks, daddy,” that could be mistaken for mild demonic possession.

The most surprising thing among the many surprising things to be heard is that after the opening verse and chorus, what follows is not the second verse and chorus but a guitar solo instead. And it’s not just a solo that goes along a static harmony or navigates a 12-bar blues. It takes on all the song's harmonic twists and the rhythmic stops-and-starts. Is this such a big deal? I mean, isn’t that what they’d done in jazz for years and years, long before who is playing here, one Frank Vincent Zappa, was born? Of course, but it’s spring 1966 and jazz was still jazz and rock was still rock though the lines were beginning to blur. Still, not even Roger McGuinn’s evocation of John Coltrane on the Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’ was quite like Zappa on ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy.’

Heck, not even the four albums mentioned earlier that mostly preceded the release of Freak Out!, the introduction to the world of Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, had an opening salvo as ground-shifting or as in-your-face as ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy.’ It feels like jumping into a car going at 65 miles per hour being driven by a long-haired, mustached, bestriped and besweatered guy from whom every utterance could be interpreted as sincere, sarcastic or something in the vast in between. No matter the intent, the result is what most matters initially. The inescapable feeling that what is being heard is markedly different from the din of the contemporaneous scene and that it still is sixty years later.

Maybe the closet corollary here is the Fugs with their tales from a year earlier of the “slum goddess from the Lower East Side” and of being overeager in proclaim liking “boobs a lot” and wearing one’s “jock a lot.” Scatological and scandalous.

‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’ is more like a pie pitched fast to the puss. It explodes in the face as it cuts up middle-of-the-road, middle-class suburban conformity: “the great midwestern hardware store” and “the supermarket dream” and being frightened out of numbing complacency by those who haven’t fulfilled the picket-fence dream or gotten ahead in the promise of post-Second World War America. Of course, these “hungry freaks” would soon be those zonked out in San Francisco’s Haight district, a phenomenon Zappa would chronicle with contempt on 1968’s We’re Only It For the Money, especially on ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps?’ and ‘Flower Punk.’

It hits home that when the subject is Zappa, there is a lot to take in and wonder about. Text and subtext. Literal and implied meaning not to mention the gargantuan weight of his music—a daunting edifice and the challenge that faces the critic who wants to write something about the big introduction to it all while admitting that he has barely gone beyond it.

No surprise then that I submit that I don’t believe that one needs to spend the requisite time—a period I would think would need to be measured in years—with the vast Zappa discography to have an acute appreciation for the zany glory of Freak Out!.

Similar to what would follow in a year’s time with Don Van Vliet, a frequent Zappa collaborator, and his debut as Captain Beefhart with his Magic Band, Safe as Milk, there is a subversiveness to hearing music where that quality is expected to be found but where it is camouflaged or scrubbed out most of the time. It builds in a tension that is its own kind of subversiveness, another moment when a new musical dialect is being created, and Zappa was building one that was as indebted to Edgar Varèse as it was to street-corner doo wop.

Consequently on ‘I Ain’t Got No Heart,’ which follows ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy,’ there’s a lot to take notice of beyond its surface which is burnished out of a send-up of bad-boy love songs. There’s the overly ripe phrasing as Zappa with Ray Collins, the lead singer of the Mothers of Invention, sing the main refrain. There’s the hooky, also overripe, horn riffs. But, there’s also the unexpected harmonic motion of the verse and that those horn lines—yes, over-the-top—are exciting, not too different from the percussive stabs on Stevie Wonder’s ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright).’

Whatever motivation there was to ‘I Ain’t Got No Heart,’ it gains an energy from being a tuneful, crafty and, most important of all, memorable pop song. This, I think, may be the big reason why Freak Out! turning 60 is an occasion of significant note.

Ray Collins had known Zappa since the early sixties. They had written a song together that the Penguins recorded: ‘Memories of El Monte.’ It was Collins who formed the group that eventually became the Mothers of Invention. Initially called the Soul Giants, it was Collins with Ray Hunt on guitar, Dave Coronado on saxophone, Ray Estrada on bass and Jimmy Carl Black on drums. Zappa replaced Hunt and the Soul Giants became the Mothers. That name was amended to the Mothers of Invention after producer Tom Wilson signed them to Verve Records and concerns that the Mothers moniker was short form for a four-syllable profanity that could be either, when used in relation to someone, a badge of honour or a withering putdown. When Freak Out! was recorded over four days in Hollywood in March 1966, the core group was Zappa, Collins, Estrada, Black and Elliot Ingber as second guitarist.

Having Collins as the group’s lead singer and hearing him truly sing on Freak Out!’s tight, compact first LP is another essential ingredient of its palatable palate. On ‘Any Way the Wind Blows.’ the album’s straightest recording, Collins’ graceful phrasing that often ends with a subtle vibrato drives it as does Zappa’s surf-rock riffs. Collins was a true balladeer—dare I call him a crooner?—that further blurred the intent of Zappa’s songs.

Consider ‘You Didn’t Try to Call Me,’ the album’s most grandiose entertainment on youthful unrequited love. Collins’ voice rises on declarations like “no matter who I take home, I keep calling your name” or on the pronouncement “’cause I love you,” turning the plea into undignified groveling for the girl. It begins with a exquisite guitar line. Its yearning quality is not much different from the opening riff of the Beach Boys’ ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice.’ It ends with Zappa, his voice pinched in a whine, lamenting about all the time he spent washing and polishing his car, and getting it re-upholstered, the second reference to upholstery on the album. It’s all satire but it’s not without some sincerity remaining intact.

Some of Freak Out!’s opening LP is pure humour. ‘Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder,’ with its howling doo-wop backgrounds and Zappa’s ridiculous recitation—“I gave you my high-school ring at the root-beer stand” for starters—are welded to music that is intentionally broad. ‘Motherly Love’ has the pleasure of being in on an inside joke with its lauding of the sexual prowess of Zappa and his bandmates and the infectious call to “forget about the brotherly and otherly love” against a catchy rhythm. ‘You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here’ is another mingling of high and low culture, full of earworms and a lovely, descending harmony plus a kazoo choir and that patented Zappa “yeah!,” basso profundo and profoundly nonsensical.

It also punctuates ‘I’m Not Satisfied,’ a peppy celebration of the brooding misanthrope and the peak of Freak Out! as at least half a pop-rock album. Dig how the horns suddenly appear as the second verse begins, and Collins and Zappa harmonizing on “who would care if I was gone?” and the wicked turnaround into the chorus. There’s no shame in calling it a model pop song. It’s not selling out or putting on an act or being polite because the ’rents are around. It’s just good music and that Zappa is the brain behind it makes it just all that more ballsy.

If Freak Out! was just that, a frequently sardonic, almost always tuneful record, that would be more than alright, but it goes far beyond that. The first hint is on the first side. ‘Who Are the Brain Police?’ starts in a flurry of fuzz, and Collins and Zappa engaging in catatonic wordless harmonizing.

The lyrics, obscure and centered on plastic and chrome, are drenched in reverb. There’s a middle section that throws the listener into a discotheque nightmare and being told again and again that “I think I’m going to die” followed by a second verse with more references to plastic and chrome that dissolves into a cloud of fuzz and kazoos.

Freak Out!’s second LP is where this dark vision begins to expand, obliterating its straight costume.

The inner gatefold of the album includes an acknowledgement section listing those who “contributed materially in many ways to make our music what it is.” One-hundred seventy-mine individuals are cited, from the obvious like Tom Wilson, who produced at least some of the album while tripping on LSD, to composers like Charles Ives, Anton Webern and Igor Stravinsky to jazz modernists like Bill Evans, Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor to a roll call of blues icons like Willie Dixon, Little Walter and Muddy Waters to contemporaries like David Crosby, Terry Kirkman of the Association and Bob Dylan to a sampling of the counterculture like Lenny Bruce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jules Feiffer and more, both knowns and unknowns.

‘Trouble Every Day,’ Zappa’s comment on the Watts riots of 1965, opens Freak Out!’s second part. It strips down the broadness of what came before and takes the Mothers of Invention back to their roots as a rhythm and blues band.

Its primary message: “that there’s no way to delay / that trouble’s comin’ every day,” echoes ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’’s that ensconcing oneself in the monochrome of suburbia won’t prevent the underbelly of society from showing up at the doorstep.

The final verse of ‘Trouble Every Day’ hits the point that the American Dream is an elaborate fantasy “if all that you can ever be / is just a lousy janitor.” The music then speeds up and fades out, the last moment on Freak Out! conforming to music as it would be commonly defined.

An undulating, repetitive, metronomic motif fragment begins. Over and over—vocalizations of a bird of prey—over and over again too—doo-wop backgrounds and streams of gibberish—a shot of the psychedelic ballroom dance of the middle of ‘Who Are the Brain Police?’—now over and over—“Help, I’m a Rock!”—then a spoken-word montage of societal unease topped with the sound of a woman in full orgasm. These are the first two movements of what was Zappa’s homage to, of all people, Elvis Presley.

‘Help, I’m a Rock’ is a three-part work. The first two parts were titled ‘Okay to Tap Dance’ and ‘In Memoriam Edgar Varèse.’ The concluding movement was called ‘It Can’t Happen Here,’ a kind of spoken-word chorale of seriously stoned choristers. Here is the first appearance of Suzy Creamcheese, voiced here by Jeanne Vassoir, a send-up of sixties teen girl fandom. A letter from the fictional Suzy is included on the album’s back cover.

Amidst the madness—there’s a sudden break to a short interlude that is one-part free jazz and one-part twelve-tone modern classical—is again one of the album’s constant messages: you can’t escape the societal chaos.

Freak Out! is a spiral. It lures the listener in with something recognizable yet weird along the edges and then normality disappears like a trap door, plunging the listener into the abyss, testing one's tolerance and willingness to be along for the full rise.

It ends with the final side dedicated to a piece entitled ‘The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.’ Zappa stated that the 12-and-a-half minute work was released incomplete. The first section, a long instrumental full of shrieking, panting, siren sounds and other paranormal sonances, more bird sounds, prepared-piano riffing, an acceleration of tempo and other happenings, was only one part of what Zappa had composed. What made it onto record still foretells countless other such mélanges of the sixties counterculture, including Love’s ‘Revelation,’ the Doors’ ‘The End’ and the Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9.’

There is a fade out and what fades in is a stoned rap session. “Flashing, man.” “America is wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful…” “Oh wow.” “It’s happening, man.” Tap dancing. Lurid repetitions of “cream cheese” by Suzy. Sped-up tape. Tom Wilson interjecting, “did you pick up on that?” A piano concerto in the key of “cream cheese.” And then. Silence.

Music complete. The chronology tells that it is now sixty-years old. Another, more reliable, chronology tells that it remains from the future. Far off. Far out. Ready for those in need of being freaked out. Your turn, Mister America.