the Terry Bozzio Albums
O VER N ITE S ENSATION AND A POSTROPHE (’)
Zappa at the Crossroads. Over-Nite Sensation (originally released in Septem- ber 1973 on the DiscReet label; currently available as Rykodisc RCD 10518). Highest Billboard Chart position: No. 32. Personnel: Ralph Humphrey, Sal Marquez, George Duke, Tom Fowler, Bruce Fowler, Ian Underwood, Ruth Underwood, and Jean-Luc Ponty.
Apostrophe (’) (originally released in March 1974 on the DiscReet label; currently available as Rykodisc RCD 10501). 1 Highest Billboard chart posi-
tion: No. 10. Personnel : Same as on Over-Nite plus Jim Gordon, John Guerin, Aynsley Dunbar, Jack Bruce, Sugar Cane Harris, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Tony Duran, and many backup singers, including an uncredited Tina Turner. “Despite the mumblings of the hippies-who-refuse-to-die, Zappa’s ‘alternative rock’ phase fi nished because that possibility died in the real world.” 2
There are two albums that stand at the center (literally, if not fi guratively) of Zappa’s career: Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe (’). Over-Nite, originally released in September 1973, was Zappa’s defi nitive move away from any rela- tionship with the Mothers of Invention. The argument the album makes is that Zappa could do the kind of satirical rock he had been doing with both early versions of the Mothers with far better musicians. Coming quickly on
Over-Nite’ s heels, in April 1974, Apostrophe (’) was responsible for moving
Zappa out of cult status and into the bedrooms and living rooms of middle America. In some measure, these are both, diffi cult albums to essay, in large part because of their popularity. Zappa’s countercultural credentials are seri- ously called into question by records rife with melody, relatively short songs, and lyrics that wander from silly to, in the case of “Don’t Eat the Yellow
5
Snow,” novelty. Watson, for one, agrees, arguing that “ Overnite Sensation, in all its neon-lit brashness, was an atrocity committed on a counter-culture now revealed as hypocritical and collusive.” 3 It was Zappa, of course, who revealed
this. Both of these albums have proved to be troubling to fans and critics alike, yet they are, at the same time, responsible for bringing a large number of new fans into the Zappa camp. 4
The two albums set the tone for a number of albums to come (especially the next two, Roxy & Elsewhere and One Size Fits All ): a wide variety of styles (rock, reggae, jazz, and a sort of “American Popular Song format”) 5 and
an expanded cast of musicians, including former Mother Ray Collins, new Mother Napoleon Murphy Brock, and one bona fi de superstar (Jack Bruce, late of the supergroup Cream), working on songs that were from a number of eras (some dating back as far as Hot Rats ). The music (individual songs will be discussed later) is, in general, far more accessible than fans had come to expect. Both albums are certainly informed by jazz ideas, but they are much closer to contemporary pop / rock albums than Zappa’s several previ- ous albums. The two albums previous to Over-Nite, Waka / Jawaka and The
Grand Wazoo, were both largely instrumental jazz / rock fusion albums fea-
turing large ensembles (20 members in the case of The Grand Wazoo ), and because of an injury Zappa had sustained during the 1971 tour (Zappa was pushed off the stage at the Rainbow Theater in London and suffered bro- ken ribs as well as wrist and ankle injures that took more than six months to heal), 6 “the focus was more on Zappa’s skills as a composer and arranger”
than on his skills as a singer and guitarist. 7 Over-Nite and Apostrophe (’) are
important, therefore, as a return to Mothers of Invention form and as close to traditional pop albums as Zappa would ever come.
Critical reception at the time was, in general, mixed. Rolling Stone dis- liked Over-Nite quite a bit, taking the stance, shared with a number of fans, that Zappa had done his best work with the Mothers and was now a “spent force.” 8 New Music Express called Over-Nite “Not one of Frank’s most out-
standing efforts.” 9 Both seemed to like Apostrophe (’); many, including Melody
Maker and Crawdaddy, found both albums too commercial. 10 Contempo-
rary reevaluation has not been so kind. The New Rolling Stone Album Guide lumps them together in a 1992 review and declares that both records are “squawking, predictable, and only desperately ‘hilarious’,” 11 whereas Musi-
chound Rock ignores Over-Nite and “evaluates” Apostrophe (’) by mentioning
that it was Zappa’s best-selling album. Steve Huey, writing for the All Music
Guide Web site argues, “Love it or hate it, Over-Nite Sensation was a water-
shed album for Frank Zappa, the point where his post-’60s aesthetic was truly established” 12 and that on Apostrophe (’) the “dirty jokes are generally more
subtle and veiled.” 13 Out of 43 reviews posted to Amazon.com, only two are
negative, and several cite the Over-Nite as Zappa’s best work ever.
For all of its other merits (many of which are discussed later), Over-Nite Sensa-
tains a number of songs that would be performed by nearly all of Zappa’s bands: “Dinah-Moe-Hum,” “Cosmik Debris,” “Camarillo Brillo,” “Dirty Love,” and “I’m the Slime.” All became concert favorites. Apostrophe (’) became even better known, largely on the back of “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow,” “Cosmik Debris,” and “Stink Foot. Two of the songs on the album, “Dinah-Moe-Hum” and “Dirty Love,” certainly became two of Zappa’s more controversial songs.
Musically, “Dinah-Moe-Hum” is a very interesting attempt at writing a pop song by someone apparently uninterested in the form. The song is fi lled with a number of musical clichés, including what Zappa called artifi cial cowboy style; there are also elements of gospel and rock in the song. The music is written in order to not get in the way of the words. 14 (The background of this
and many of Zappa’s more overtly funny songs features a stock electric piano sound that apes the kind of ubiquitous Nashville studio sound prevalent in many early seventies middle-of-the-road country tunes; this is carried farthest in the song “Truck Driver Divorce” from the album Them or Us ). In The
Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa argues that this kind of background (unob-
trusive or full of obvious musical jokes) is a sign that he thinks the characters or subjects of the song are doing something stupid.
The song begins with a burbling guitar riff (similar, in some respects, to the sound Heart would make famous in “Barracuda”) and becomes more complex, featuring rapid and unexpected tone and tempo changes and some challenging keyboard and percussion work. The center section of the song, which features a spoken-word narrative by Zappa, sees the music transform into the kind of background music one might hear underneath the action sequence in a cheesy seventies television show or porn movie.
There are a number of ways to view this song: as a cheap shot (one of many Zappa would take) at ideological posturing (in this case the sort of privileged, white, middle-class feminism that he would attack again and again); as a song about the arrogance and ineptitude of men; as a mean and defensive attack on women’s liberation; or as, simply, a product of its time.
The narrative is fairly straightforward: a woman offers the narrator $40 if he can make Dinah-Moe hum. The narrator accepts and proceeds to apply all manner of erotic techniques to Dinah-Moe and is not successful, even after three hours of work. Taken this way (as a linear narrative), the song is somewhat juvenile (and there are a lot of lame, potty-mouthed sex jokes in the song), but a close analysis of some of the lyrics shows us that even in this silliest of songs, Zappa is offering a strong and potentially misunderstood critique of U.S. sexual mores.
The lines “I got a spot that gets me hot / but you ain’t been to it” seem clearly to be a reference to the burgeoning feminist movement; 1973, the year the song “Dinah-Moe-Hum” was written, also marks the fi rst publication of
Our Bodies, Ourselves. Although these lines are silly, they also seem to represent
the challenge that women’s sexuality was presenting to men. The strongest challenge to a patriarchal society, as many feminist theorists have argued, is a
strong female sexuality, one that demands of men the same thing that men had been demanding of women since the beginning of time. This argument is made more complex by what immediately follows: “Just get me wasted . . . then my body don’t care.” There are two fairly obvious readings of this. The fi rst is of the frat-boy just-get-her-drunk” variety. The second, however, is a more diffi cult leap to make: that Zappa, through the construction of this character, is making a statement about drugs and sexuality (in other words, by making the female character rather foolish, he can make her argument about needing to be chemi- cally altered to enjoy sex a bad thing). This verse is also consistent with Zappa’s strong antidrug stance. Another, more interesting (and more traditionally sec- ond-generation feminist) reading of these lines, of course, is that the song argues that men are so crude and ill-equipped sexually (and / or were so sexu- ally unenlightened at the time) that a woman had no real choice but to divorce her mind from her body in order to gain even a small amount of pleasure.
The song goes on and degenerates into a fairly odd tale of voyeurism, masturbation, dominance and submission, and, fi nally, sexual satisfaction for Dinah-Moe. The point in all of this, I feel, is that Zappa is making an argu- ment, one he made before and one he would make until the end of his life, that Americans carry with them, because of their Puritan heritage, an odd tendency to both like and hate sex at the same time and that white, middle- class men are prone to stupidity and selfi shness when it comes to sexual gratifi cation (the narrator, it must be said, does work very hard to make sure that Dinah-Moe reaches orgasm).
I am not willing, completely, to buy Zappa’s argument that he is just tell- ing the truth or just trying to entertain; however, I do think that it is unfair to view a song like “Dinah-Moe-Hum” through the lens of early-twenty- fi rst-century morality; things were different in 1973, and that, in many ways, is what Zappa is arguing.
The other song on the album that is overtly about sex is “Dirty Love,” one in a long line of Zappa songs that supposedly exposes the hypocrisy of love songs. Musically, this song is as straightforward as Zappa’s writing gets: no rapid shifts in meter, tone, or style, just straight-ahead blues / jazz riffi ng with a short and tonal guitar solo during the break. In his autobiography, Zappa discusses this idea that lead him to write a song like this, arguing that traditional love songs are fundamentally dishonest (see previous discus- sion).
In many ways, “Dirty Love” embodies this philosophy. 15 Lyrics such as
“I don’t need your sweet devotion / I don’t want your cheep emotion” are direct and to the point. Much like “Dinah-Moe-Hum,” however, “Dirty Love” strays in the end, in this case into a sordid tale of bestiality, for no other reason than it fascinated Zappa. 16
There are a number of interesting interpretations of this song by Zappa’s critics. David Walley calls it “your basic ditty about road mania and lust with some Dada poodle business thrown in.” 17 Barry Miles writes:
In “Dirty Love” the narrator encounters a groupie whom he treats entirely as a sex object. . . . For Zappa, that was all there was to sex: as long as everyone had an orgasm, everything was all right. “Dirty Love” concludes with [a] young woman having sex with her poodle. It probably never occurred to Zappa that this description of bestiality might offend people. 18
Continuing on the poodle theme, Neil Slaven writes, “Dirty Love was less graphic [than ‘Dinah-Moe-Hum’] but how explicit do you need to be when you write a song about a woman receiving oral gratifi cation from a poodle?” Slaven then quotes Zappa as defending himself by arguing “Poodles serve as a convenient mechanism for conveying certain philosophical ideas that might otherwise be more diffi cult.” 19 Although Zappa never describes what these
certain philosophical ideas might be, one can make an educated guess that it was sexual repression.
I would like to argue that the song is not an endorsement of bestiality but an example of what James Wood calls “the comedy of correctness.” In his argument, Woods argues that this oldest form of comedy was “written to prove how repetitively stupid we all are, by a writer whose comedy is often cruel [and] who was obsessed with the folly and vices of bourgeois idiocy.” 20
This is Zappa in a nutshell. If one looks, the characters of whom Zappa is most critical—politicians, televangelists, priests, Jewish American Princesses, groupies, the members of his own band—one fi nds that there is a defi nite target that Zappa continually hits: the overinfl ated sense of ownership of the white, middle-class American. Looked at in this way, in the context of the time and through the framework of Zappa’s ongoing project of social cri- tique, “Dinah-Moe-Hum” and “Dirty Love” can be seen, perhaps, as simply parts of a larger, lifelong project of social critique.
The two songs on the album that are most overtly political are “Camarillo Brillo” and “I’m the Slime.” Both of these songs seem to target what Zappa thought were the excesses of the early seventies. In “I’m the Slime,” Zappa makes the argument that television is “gross and perverted,” yet at the same time is “the tool of the government / and industry too.” In many ways, this is Zappa’s double critique of both the entertainment industry and the people who support the television industry. Zappa is on the record in a number of places about thinking that making an industry out of entertainment is the worst kind of capitalist impulse. This is a simplistic and problematic argu- ment, of course, because at times Zappa comes off looking as if he is merely jealous that his art is not making the kind of money the Beatles or Beach Boys were making. Perhaps this is the tension between being self-conscious and uncompromising. The only thing worse than creating art that only a few people enjoy, of course, is knowing it. 21
Musically, “I’m the Slime” has a lot going on. The introduction makes the listener believe that he or is hearing a true jazz / rock workout. Starting with a solo guitar, drums, and keyboards, the song quickly segues into a keyboard
and brass theme (much like something Chicago, Three Dog Night, or Earth, Wind & Fire might have been doing at the same time) that builds to a climax in less than a minute. The song then radically shifts; the music becomes back- ground music for Zappa’s spoken-word discussion (much as it does in “Dirty Love” and “Dinah-Moe-Hum”), returning to the big jazz / rock theme for the chorus (featuring an uncredited appearance by Tina Turner and the Ikettes) and a blazing and bluesy out-solo that runs until the end-of-song fade.
Lyrically, “I’m the Slime” retreads much of the ground fi rst covered with “Trouble Every Day” (which would be rerecorded in 1974 as “More Trouble Every Day”). Zappa sings, “I am gross and perverted / . . . I am destined to rule / And regulate you.” His increasing anger at what he saw as the collusion of the government and the entertainment industry (an argument to warm the hearts of Marxists and postmodernists everywhere) would show up more and more on future albums.
Both musically and thematically, the most interesting song on the album is “Camarillo Brillo,” one of the few pop songs in the Zappa catalog written in an understandable idiom (all major-chord changes and grand piano fl our- ishes). Musically, the song avoids some of the excesses that mar even the best of Zappa’s work. There are very few odd time signatures or shifts in tone, meter, or style, and the musicians play together instead of against each other (as they seem to be doing in many of Zappa’s other songs). 22 Production-
wise, it is reminiscent of early-seventies Allman Brothers or Black Oak Arkansas. If not for the questionable subject matter, the song would have been right at home on the radio; it is catchy and memorable.
Thematically, it is a cold shot at the sort of hippie mysticism that Zappa had been attacking since “Who Needs the Peace Corps?” The narrator of the story meets up with a woman who has a “Camarillo Brillo,” which, I am apt to believe, is a sort of white Afro, the kind of hairstyle that a middle-class woman who was attempting to be “down with the struggle” might have worn. The narrator informs us that this woman thinks of herself as a “magic mama” and is someone who could “throw a mean tarot”; her room has an “incense stencher” where she “hung her castanets.” All of these are signs that the woman in the song is putting on her street credentials as affectation. Perhaps the most damn- ing accusation against her (one that would return on the next album in the song “Cosmik Debris”) is the narrator’s question: “is that a real poncho or a sears poncho,” which returns to one of Zappa’s favorite themes: the fakeness of the counterculture. Although the woman in “Camarillo Brillo” would go ahead and have sex with the narrator, her reasons for doing so are questionable.
The remaining songs on the album include concert favorites “Zomby Woof ” and “Montana” as well as the interesting blues workout “Fifty-Fifty.” “Zomby Woof” is an incredibly diffi cult piece of music that shows off the vastly increased technical profi ciency of this edition of the Mothers. Courrier calls it a “heavy metal hybrid of Louis Jordan and Fats Waller,” 23 as good a
ties horror fi lm references, this time neatly juxtaposing them with a story of morning-after regret.
“Fifty-Fifty” is the forgotten cut on the album. Sung by Ricky Lancelotti, who would be dropped from the band almost immediately after performing on this song, it is a vaguely blues-based workout that returns to the theme of the uselessness of love songs: “Ain’t gonna sing you no love song / How my heart is all sore . . . ’Cause you heard it before.” The song features, among other things, some wild soloing by George Duke, Jean Luc Ponty, and Zappa on guitar.
The album closes with the song “Montana,” 24 more of an exercise in pure
parody and silliness (with a great guitar solo) than a political statement. Zappa’s ode to dental fl oss is hilarious and memorable.