More Frank Zappa
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Zappa
What to listen for you ask? That’s an easy one. Just listen for the best sounding Mothers record ever made, because that’s what the best copies can (and should) sound like.
Absolutely Free is much bigger, smoother, richer, livelier and more free from harshness, dryness and distortion than any other album we’ve ever played from Zappa’s early period, pre-Waka Jawaka let’s say. The only other records I can think of that can sound remotely as good as Absolutely Free are Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (1968) and Hot Rats (1969), and even then I really don’t think they are quite in this league.
- BY FAR the best copy to ever hit the site – White Hot on side one and Nearly White on side two
- You will not believe how rich and Tubey Magical this copy is, and yet so CLEAR and undistorted
- If you’ve suffered through reissues or the dreadful CD you are going to flip out over the sound of this copy
- 4 1/2 Stars: “By turns hilarious, inscrutable, and virtuosically complex, Absolutely Free is… a fabulously inventive record…”
Credit the incredibly talented Val Valentin with engineering that to our ears gives every indication of being a clear step up over everything else Zappa released in the ’60s.
Our last shootout was in 2007 — yes, about nine years ago. We can’t even find one clean copy of this album a year (at prices we can afford to pay of course). To be honest, one copy in our shootout was exceptionally quiet but the sound is a big step down from this one.
Side One
Amazingly extended on the top and bottom, when have we ever heard an early Zappa record sound this BIG and CLEAR? Never.
So much Tubey Magic too without any smear or loss of presence.
Side Two
The sound really gets good starting with track two. Big, rich, clear and present, the sound is Hard To Fault.
Note that Mint Minus Minus to EX++ is the play grade for this side two, about as quiet as most of the copies we auditioned in our shootout. Those of you looking for quiet vinyl and top quality sound are going to have to look elsewhere, and in regard to that we wish you good luck with your endeavors. As I’m sure you know, most original Blue Label copies of this album are beat beyond recognition and simply not playable on high quality equipment.
Val Valentin
Valentin’s list of credits runs for days. Some high points are of course Ella and Louis, and Getz/Gilberto.
Recently we played a copy of We Get Requests by the Oscar Peterson Trio that blew our mind. And we have been big fans of Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley for more than a decade.
Pull up his credits on Allmusic. No one I am familiar with other than Rudy Van Gelder recorded more great jazz, and in our opinion Valentin’s recordings are quiet a bit more natural sounding than Rudy’s, especially with regard to the piano.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Plastic People
The Duke Of Prunes
Amnesia Vivace
The Duke Regains His Chops
Call Any Vegetable
Invocations And Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin
Soft-Sell Conclusion
Side Two
America Drinks
Status Back Baby
Uncle Bernie’s Farm
Song Of Suzy Creamcheese
Brown Shoes Don’t Make It
America Drinks & Goes Home
AMG Review
Frank Zappa’s liner notes for Freak Out! name-checked an enormous breadth of musical and intellectual influences, and he seemingly attempts to cover them all on the second Mothers of Invention album, Absolutely Free.
Leaping from style to style without warning, the album has a freewheeling, almost schizophrenic quality, encompassing everything from complex mutations of “Louie, Louie” to jazz improvisations and quotes from Stravinsky’s Petrushka. It’s made possible not only by expanded instrumentation, but also Zappa’s experiments with tape manipulation and abrupt editing, culminating in an orchestrated mini-rock opera (“Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”) whose musical style shifts every few lines, often in accordance with the lyrical content.
In general, the lyrics here are more given over to absurdity and non sequiturs, with the sense that they’re often part of some private framework of satirical symbols. But elsewhere, Zappa’s satire also grows more explicitly social, ranting against commercial consumer culture and related themes of artificiality and conformity.
By turns hilarious, inscrutable, and virtuosically complex, Absolutely Free is more difficult to make sense of than Freak Out!, partly because it lacks that album’s careful pacing and conceptual focus. But even if it isn’t quite fully realized, Absolutely Free is still a fabulously inventive record, bursting at the seams with ideas that would coalesce into a masterpiece with Zappa’s next project.