23 : Chunga’s Revenge

I used to have this album, and sold it in the great vinyl clear out of the early 2000s. I like Zappa, indeed I like him a lot, but I owned the record for years and rarely played it.

Every FZ album had its moments, but the listening experience depends on how deeply those moments are concealed within the rest of the stuff. Sometimes you get lucky and have an essential album–Roxy and Elsewhere for example, but often you don’t.

Chunga’s Revenge is an odd mix of the interesting and the disposable and is curiously fragmentary. It starts straight into oddness, Transylvania Boogie, with FZ soloing in a ‘eastern’ scale over Aynsley Dunbar’s drum pattern that starts out in some weird time signature but resolves to bluesy 4s. 20 Small Cigars is composed jazz. A lot of the rest is non-essential though, and is FZ doing his usual thing of soloing over a vamping rhythm section with more style than substance.

To be sure, a routine FZ workout like the heavy bluesTell Me You Love Me is more muscular and on the money than 99% of his contemporaries, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying in a ‘could do better’ kind of way.

Interesting to hear again, but young me was right to sell it on to someone who might appreciate it more.