28 February : Hot Rats

Two bona fide classics to finish of the month, one American, one British (tomorrow).

In my 10 February post I said that Burnt Weenie Sandwich was Frank Zappa’s downpayment on what was to come. Hot Rats is where it comes together. Just like Moondance, this is an album I haven’t had to revisit because I’ve never stopped playing it. For me, it marks the beginning of his glory years, when he starts to realise his potential.

And he has some fantastic musicians on here. By this time he’d disbanded the original Mothers because he didn’t think they could play the music he wanted to make. I think he was right, and you can hear it most obviously in the drums and bass.

There are no weird interludes here, no musical slapstick, and only one track, Willie The Pimp, has vocals, and they’re delivered by Captain Beefheart. The music is considered and composed. It draws on jazz and blues while making any other pretenders to ‘heavy’ rock credentials look like callow neophytes.

In my comments on The Move’s Shazam I wrote that I’ve had my head in 1970 long enough now to recognise that Shazam already sounded dated on release (dead on arrival if you ask me, but a casual search online shows that it has its fans).  It’s albums like Hot Rats that give substance to that. If you were serious about making music (as opposed to making good commercial pop), this was an album that raised the bar, an album against which you were likely to be compared.

New Musical Express, in an article that bordered on hagiography, identifed Zappa as someone taking music out of the 60s and into the 70s. I think that has to be right, whether you like his music or not. The thing with Hot Rats is that even those who don’t like Zappa or his work (and there are plenty of them) usually exempt this album from their criticisms.

The Zappa estate recently released a boxed set of the complete Hot Rats Sessions. I don’t own it, partly because I can’t afford it, but equally because I’m not sure if I want to hear it: I’m happy with the end result. It is on Spotify, though, if you fancy 7hrs+ of outtakes and rehearsals.

The whole of the original album is available on YouTube below.