10 February : The J is the Juice

The third of the albums released 9 February 1970 and my favourite of them. I’ve had Burnt Weeny Sandwich for a long time, including on my MP3 player for travelling. It isn’t my favourite Zappa album, that would be 1974’s Roxy and Elsewhere, but it’s a pretty good statement of where he was coming from and a pointer to where he was going.

We have his love of Doo-Wop, an explicit tip of the hat to Stravinsky, and pentatonic excursions on a Gibson over a percussive backdrop of shifting time signatures. We have the compositions that take cues from modern classical and jazz, especially in the use of piano, and turn-on-a-dime stylistic changes, often within the same tune; the piano intro shifting into the band them in the first few minutes of Little House I Used to Live In is a fine example.

The pieces are based on outtakes and other material from the Mothers of Invention years, although he had just dissolved that band. He had just released the brilliant Hot Rats in the US (but released February/March in the UK so watch out for it in a future post 😊) and was heading towards what I think was the best realised music of his career.

Just as I can’t imagine anyone but the Beatles coming up with Abbey Road, so I can’t think of anyone else who could have produced the music on Burnt Weeny Sandwich. Everything is filtered through the brain of Zappa, a man for whom playing in 4/4 was unnatural because you don’t talk in 4/4.

So, for all I like it, why isn’t this in my top two or three of his albums? Several reasons. On Burnt Weeny Sandwich his guitar style is not yet quite fully formed, and neither is his compositional style. Little House I Used to Live In is impressive, but you can hear the joins in ways you wouldn’t in later recordings. Secondly, you can hear why, with the end of the original Mothers, he made a point of hiring a string of fabulous drummers and percussionists.

To be sure, Zappa at this time was streets ahead of most of his contemporaries, but he was still searching for the music he heard in his head. Burnt Weeny Sandwich isn’t the money shot, but it’s a fine downpayment.

All on Spotify.

And this is Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown; all of human life is here.