Who IS Frank Zappa

What I don't understand is why these albums, along with Finer Moments, which were completed 20 years ago, are being released after other albums which were compiled or discovered by Joe Travers and Gail years after Zappa's passing... Why not release these unreleased albums first? It's great to get the two Wazoo live albums, One Shot Deal, even Feeding the Monkeys album, as well as full concert albums like Hammersmith Odeon, FZ:OZ, etc. but these unreleased completed albums should have been released years ago, instead of stuff like Joe's Corsage, EIHN, Congress Shall Make No Law, and other useless and unnecessary albums with little to no musical value.

Edited by darkshade - January 06 2013 at 13:29

I'm not as big of a buff in Zappa history as you guys are. 

And it is just basically a lost double album? Entirely new material? Where does it keep coming from? 

Getting Finer Moments, I hope it is something in the vein of Lather's unpredictability.

I'm on disc 2 now, and it seems to be a little more avant-garde like Weasels Ripped My Flesh than disc 1, which was more avant-jazz/fusion. There's even some really quiet moments, then all of a sudden the music explodes. Crazy !!! 

Edited by darkshade - January 03 2013 at 12:40

It's OK. I understand.

Edited by darkshade - January 03 2013 at 12:00

Never thought of those three as a trilogy, but since there is a certain common thread running through almost all of his albums, and since he treated his albums as part of some big macrostructure anyway, it's not far fetched at all to see them as a trio.

I will take this opportunity, though, to "call BS" on Joe's Garage a little bit.  I can't help but feel like the concept/storyline was just kind of grafted on after the fact, and it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me anyway.  A lot of the songs were recycled from older days (e.g. "Stick it Out" from the old 1971 "Sofa" suite, "A Token of My Extreme" from the Roxy era, "Green Rosetta" from Lather, etc), and that also suggests to me that he was reaching a bit.  Of course, it IS Frank Zappa, who couldn't make a bad album if he tried.  So it's still a good album, and it does seem to work on some level, both as a rock album and as a story line.   Still, there are too many random detours (Sy Borg? wtf is that?) to really remain convincing to me.

darkshade wrote: What kind of a man would write these 3 albums in a row? Conceptually, these all run together as a trilogy. The conceptual continuity is all over Frank's music, but these three are linked by the events surrounding Lather, the "in between tracks" found on Lather and Shiek, and you can even see that somewhere in the beginning of Lather, is a short version of Little Green Rosetta, and Joe's Garage ends with A Little Green Rosetta, longer and with a lot of crazy stuff.  It's a 5+ hour listen, but how do you guys feel about this? I thought about it earlier, and thought it was a cool enough idea to present to the PA Zappa fans.

Guess I'm going to have to do this now.

Also, I've been in love with The Adventures of Greggery Peccary lately. What a solid track.


Edited by The Truth - January 03 2013 at 11:40

What kind of a man would write these 3 albums in a row?

I prefer to think that Zappa was God.