Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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[CONCEPTUAL CONTINUITY]

If I posted this previously, then I beg a thousand pardons.



My memory of this song is tied up tight with a single summer day, its weather in particular. Dense overcast, thick air that was almost body temperature; every indication that heavy rain would be encroaching any moment. When Dex Card cued up the song on an otherwise-unmarked-in-my-memory July mid-afternoon, I was undoubtedly "grounded" for some random affront to my mother's authority, and so feeling trapped on the premises. Even though she was at work, the bluff  kept me to within a line of sight on Highland Ave.

I'd surely heard the song before, but the vibe on that day seemed fraught with portent, like the impending storm. The string dissonances in the opening bars are probably not any more avant garde than "Chopsticks," but when the girls started singing, there was something pinched-up about the sound that smelled like trouble to my little shell-like ears. They sounded upset, smoldering in rage even. About to make with the tears just like the sky. I don't remember if it actually rained that afternoon.

Today the weather seemed identical, and so I put on my "7th" iPod playlist while puttering in the weeds and dirt, wondering if the experience might replicate. It did. Mist began condensing out of the clouds about an hour ago. But this time the sky let loose for real while I was composing the previous paragraph. And there's no more sunlight than if it were 8:45 pm (instead of 5:15).

I'm not offering any particular point except that multisensory memory can transport a person out of his current skin, and that in turn can be stimulated by technology with the aim of excavating a stratum of past experience. Why not? Did you do anything more profound than that this afternoon?

Sweet Talkin' Guy, The Chiffons (1966), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Friday Night Fish Fry (!)

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Been awhile. Happy birthday, Frank! (21 December 1940).



This is the wider world's introduction to FZ and the Mothers of Invention. First tune---grand slam in every way, from attitude to lyrics to arrangement to teen beat. I wonder whether the US counterculture would have been different had Zappa's management and the Verve label had invested several-thousand bucks in strategic payola and disc jockey blowjobs to get this track on the AM radio in fall 1966 (and backed by "Trouble Every Day"). There's a lot on this album that sounds not unlike the Stones. But... fat chance. Have you ever heard lyrics like this on any commercial or NPR radio station?

You know the routine---jam in the earbuds and crank it up to where snot starts running down your upper lip. My first version of this tune and the album it's on was vinyl:

Hungry Freaks, Daddy, The Mothers of Invention (1966, from "Freak Out," Verve V6-5005-2X), embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry (After Hours)

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Here's an unpublished (so to speak) set of Beatles tunes performed live by Frank Zappa and his ill-fated "best band you never heard in your life," from a 1988 concert in Helsinki.



I reckon Sir Paul will authorize commercial release of these recordings by the Zappa Family Trust about the time he officially designates Heather Mills as the Fifth Beatle.

Two things stand out to me in this clip: the quaint topicality of the lyrics and the technical acumen of both the musicians and the engineers in echoing the studio-type feel of the original Beatles recordings.

At this point in Frank's life, he was preoccupied by (among many other things) how TV evangelism had infused US politics with a sinister overtone, and so he was delighted when preachers like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were publicly exposed as sexual "perverts" and moral hypocrites, and he gleefully used it as "material." Most of the lyrics here focus on Swaggart, whose sex scandal broke into the news during the band's 1988 tour. But these were the waning days of the second Reagan administration, with the Iran-Contra affair and other Republican outrages having broken the windshield of our little democracy flivver and flattened three of its tires while the President drifted into senility. So we hear Zappa's mocking references to such one-hit wonders as National Security Advisor Admiral Poindexter and Attorney General Ed Meese. I think Zappa's parody lyrics are at their best when they remain vulgar and playful, as opposed to the more coarsely obscene texts for which he became infamous (in the Clean World, at least). In these pieces he veers over into the "obscene" lane, but arguably expresses no greater magnitude of depravity than Swaggart guiltily preached on any given day in his ministry. And all these lyrics are based on True Facts---set to the music of the Fab Four!

As one commenter on this video said (but for a different implied reason than I would give, and with which I disagree), the Beatles could not have performed most of these songs live with anywhere near the fidelity that FZ and his band accomplish in this performance. That's partially explained by the level of sophistication that synthesizer technology had reached by the end of his career, but much more so by Zappa's almost-supernatural ears and almost-peerless skills as an arranger. The musicians must also be credited for their technical skills, but as herded and over-rehearsed by FZ and---worse---a junior musician whom he put in charge of drilling the band on a daily basis as his own health began to emerge as a debilitating problem. Because of his stature, Zappa could get away with rehearsal schedules that could fairly be called abusive, but his second-tier foreman couldn't command the same obedience. So Zappa's musicians revolted and the band fell apart halfway through the world tour. (Strangely, Wikipedia doesn't have any account of this major milestone in Zappa's career---the end of it as a performing musician, to be exact---so I can't link to it.)

This video presents the same 12-piece band documented live on Broadway the Hard Way, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, and Make A Jazz Noise Here, which Zappa issued to help him recover from a financial loss of about half a million dollars (in an era when that probably meant twice as much as it does today). Broadway is the most broadly (hurhurhurrrr) appealing, but bristles with Reagan-era political topicality that isn't universal enough to have aged well. The others have a few high points, but come across as thrown-together filler tour tapes. The Beatles suite played here is much more entertaining and respectful of the source material than the pointlessly condescending covers of "Purple Haze" and "Stairway To Heaven" that show up on Best Band.

I think FZ really believed that this lineup was in fact his best band ever. From a technical standpoint, that would be his call to make. But as a fan, I've never gotten much enjoyment from his '80s ensembles. They achieved their precision and impressive responsiveness to Zappa's extemporaneous direction through the maestro's extreme exercise of control and, as I say, over-rehearsal to the point of sounding brittle underneath it all. Nevertheless, this particular segment sounds more relaxed and human than I've come to expect from Zappa's latter-day aggregations.

What do you think? Does this music do anything for you?

Beatles Suite, Frank Zappa and band (1988, live in Helsinki, Finland, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: as Fifty50 readers who have taken Music Appreciation will observe, this music isn't actually a medley, but a regular sequence of songs with each having a segue into the next.

Friday Evening After Hours

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This balls-heavy power trio track from Frank Zappa's Apostrophe(') album has always been linked in my mind to the approach of a certain monstrous, torrential chain-lightning storm as heralded by gorgeously hideous thunderheads the color of lead and a curiously refreshing 20 mph wind out of the west.



I'm certain that this tune would make a terrific soundtrack for the approach of Hurricane Irene assuming that (1) you and yours are personally safe, (2) all irreplaceable valuables are secured in a watertight fortress, (3) you are fully insured, and (4) you don't live within reach of the storm surge. Lotta ifs, I know. But what else can a Simple Country Editor offer other than best wishes and exciting incidental music?

Seriously, this is one of the most interesting power trio jams I've ever heard, with Jack Bruce strangling a dramatic fuzz-bass fanfare-style solo from his instrument right out of the gate. Then, once Bruce's hyperactive "preliminaries" are concluded, Zappa slips in from rhythm to an aggressive, precision solo that reminds me of a serpent's tongue made out of piano wire. It slashes its way through or around all obstacles popping out of the rhythm bed, where Bruce is still strumming away like Oedipus plucking at his own optic nerves. This is one of those tracks (and albums) that you have to own on high-quality physical media and pump hard through a nice set of real headphones at 11. Even on a simple track like this one, Zappa had a lot of things going on deeper in the mix that are lost in MP3 files and computer headphones.

I hope anyone in the hurricane path who might be listening and reading along comes through it all with nothing worse than a wet bird, as Sinatra used to say.

Apostrophe', Frank Zappa (1974, from "Apostrophe(')," DiscReet DS 2175), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Hey, whattaya know---we have an actual, bona fide prayer meeting tonight! Hurry: step right up!



Somewhat prescient, eh? The only somewhat false note is Zappa's use of the word "friendly" to describe Jesus Freaks. In my experience at a nominally Presbyterian college during most of the 1970s, that term was rarely applicable (mostly only in the early years of the decade). And today? They long ago joined a club that coheres solely by expressing its collective disapproval of, and superiority to, America's undesirables (i.e., everyone who doesn't belong to the club). This makes them feel so good about themselves, at least until they get home, that they give the preacher bales of money to run lucrative, tax-exempt business enterprises so he can live the lifestyle of a Renaissance-era Cardinal.

And, seriously, we ain't Number 3, either. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing, Frank Zappa (October 1978, Saturday Night Live, NBC), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I do not wish to lead our British Cousin, Marginalia, down another maudlin path with this evening's musical selection, like I did last time. So tonight I humbly put forth a more robust offering from the spoiled-romance department.



Now I, myself, never had a problem with my girlfriends' "mamas"---they always seemed to adore me...more than their fucking daughters did, actually! In fact, it's too bad that they didn't have "cougars" back then, because I might have made it once or twice! Anyway, I consider this jaunty tune to illustrate another case of a missed Frank Zappa opportunity for a hit radio single. True, the "kill your mama" meme would probably have sent 1970 broadcast sensors into a tizzy, but maybe he could have gotten airplay with it on FM "underground" stations. In my opinion, this track has it all: an aggressive beat, great lummox-rock riff, a zillion instruments on its jazz-rock chart, and humor in both lyrics and arrangement. In a more perfect world, this song---not the embarrassing and tiresome Dinah-Moe Humm---would have been his concert encore crowd-pleaser.

The cover art of the album from which this track is extracted, "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," is also worth remarking upon, and I'm delighted that the YouTuber who posted "Guitar" included it as the visual channel. I remember "freaking out" when I first saw this hilariously creepy cover during the summer of '70, on an excursion to an incense-fogged record store in Piper's Alley, Old Town, in Chicago. Sight unheard, so to speak, I eagerly dug out my $3.25, which was plucked from my hand by a greasy longhair with 8-inch dingy yellow fingernails that sickly curled toward the palms of his hand. (What a jagoff!) Fortuitously, 40-some-odd years later it came to my attention that this album jacket artwork was inspired by the cover of a postwar pulp men's magazine. Scroll down below the song credits to see it, and note the inconspicuous article title at bottom right of the cover.

My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1970, from"Weasels Ripped My Flesh," Warner Bros. - Reprise - Bizarre MS 2028), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Here's a sound that my friend Gurlitzer might enjoy; a jazz waltz of sorts. From a surprising source.



Gurlizer knew me back when I thought it was hip to smoke blueberry Tiparillos and wear railroad-striped bell bottoms. And that was when Frank Zappa recorded this song, a year or two after flower power had flared into full-fledged revolt in some major cities. But I was "enjoying" all that at a distance during high school, vicariously, through music, underground comix, black-light posters, incense, and other lifestyle accessories. This was the same general timeframe when a Mothers concert in West Berlin ended in a fairly violent riot instigated by German revolutionaries affiliated with the Red Army Faction, not to mention the Altamont Speedway deaths and mayhem. This recording was actually left over from the Hot Rats sessions, which produced a late 1969 jazz album of the same name. It's an odd inclusion in the Burnt Weeny Sandwich album, which is mostly avant garde rock-jazz with some straight-ahead comedy blues and other miscellany.

Zappa could have written sweet, lyrical compositions like "Twenty Small Cigars" until the cows came home. Not that he should have, necessarily. And furthermore, he might have authorized his effective but ethically dubious manager of the time, Herb Cohen, to spread around some payola---or at least some fellatiola---to get tracks like this aired on FM "underground" stations during the late '60s and early '70s. By all accounts I've read, though, Zappa always refrained from payola. But maybe he shouldn't have. And so now, maybe because he shied away from his gentle side and mostly wrote compositions better suited to frame his endless social satire and raunchy comedy, Zappa is remembered by the general public not for his astonishing writing and performing capabilities, but for novelty songs like "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," "Dinah-Moe Humm," and "Valley Girl." And also for eating one of his own turds live on stage during a mid-'60s concert. (The last item being someone's invention, of course, and one that annoyed FZ.)

"Twenty Small Cigars" belongs to a very small category of Zappa recordings that not only documents songs that he composed with emotion, purely for beauty of melody and setting, but also performed without any of the clowning or sarcasm that marred most recordings of such compositions. There are few others like this one in Zappa's catalog. I think it's a gem

Twenty Small Cigars, Frank Zappa (1970, from "Chunga's Revenge," reissued 1995 as RykoDisc RCD 10511), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Then and now

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As I revisited Zappa's "Mom and Dad" earlier this evening I was slightly taken aback by the condemnation of police as the Establishment's agents of political violence. I believe that was true: impulsive police disrespect for and harassment of "longhairs" was known by most of "us" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, if not from first-hand experience, then from the accounts of our friends and acquaintances, and certainly from continual news reports. Each individual circumstance differed, of course, and two reasonable people could have reached opposite conclusions about many of them. Also, cops also certainly created uncomfortable circumstances for "hippies" caught in the process of committing a crime, and I doubt that rednecks got any gentler treatment when apprehended committing the same acts. Nevertheless, after sifting through those ambiguities, it was clear then and now that the police, and even the state National Guards, were agents of suppressing lawful political assembly and expression.

This evening, in a TPM report about a possible accomplice in the Giffords massacre, here's part of what Pima County (Arizona) Sheriff Clarence Dupnik had to say to reporters at a news conference:

The sheriff spent several minutes directing his anger at the "vitriol" he said comes from radio and television personalities. "That may be free speech, but its not without consequences," Dupnik said.

"I hope that are all Americans are as saddened and as shocked as we are," he said.

"We need to do a little soul searching."

Arizona in particular, he said, has "become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

I think it's fair to say that law-enforcement officers tend to be socially conservative in any location. So it's heartening to me that one from an especially "conservative" corner of the nation would directly acknowledge misgivings to a national audience that certain social worldviews in his jurisdiction have gotten way out of hand.

I believe that the typical sworn law-enforcement officer, like the typical soldier, is indoctrinated with a clear concept of duty and professional mission that trumps individual beliefs. I know we can point to racially motivated police brutality, for example, as one of many indicators that cops are no more perfect than any other sector of society. But my point is that at this point in time, police are not largely in the business of suppressing liberal political expression. That task was "privatized" somewhere along the way.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Convened a day late this week, instead of a Fish Fry, out of respect for five six who died in the Arizona political massacre today, and the rest who were maimed or traumatized. This is Frank Zappa's tender, seething commentary on the consequences of right-wing political violence. Different era and M.O., but the victims are still innocent.



Mom and Dad, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1968, from "We're Only In It For The Money," originally issued on Verve V6-5045X), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Went to buy some cheap detergent
Some emergent nation 
Got my load



"Can't Afford No Shoes" (lyrics here, because it's hard to catch most of them without reading along) was not an evergreen crowd-pleaser in Frank Zappa's live performance repertoire, but I don't understand why. The Recession/Depression economics theme was surely of concern to Zappa's audience from the time this song was released in the mid-70s well past beyond the sunrise in of St. Reagan's Morning in America. (It certainly was to me, as late as 1983!) And the composition was about as straight-ahead of a hard rocker as Zappa ever recorded.

The instrumental arrangement is explosive, as you will hear if you jam in your waxy little earbuds and crank up the volume. The rhythm section is really punchy, and the guitar tones are aggressive. Based on the liner notes in both copies of this album that I possess, it looks like Zappa is playing the slightly unhinged slide/Dobro-sounding solo about halfway through. He usually delegated this sound to Denny Whalley, who was actually playing with him in 1975 (maybe an album-credit oversight?). If there's a harmonica down in the mix on this track, and I can't tell on this low-fi YouTube clip, it is being respirated by one Bloodshot Rollin' Red, known in the personal mythology of all Zappaphiles as Captain Beefheart, the charming avant-garde multimedia artist what I composed a humble eulogy for yesterday.

The vocals are, in my opinion, somewhat marred by the inexplicable self-mocking delivery that seemed to self-sabotage any number of Zappa cuts that had all other necessary elements for a big radio hit. Johnny "Guitar" Watson, one of FZ's musical idols, is credited with vocals on two other cuts of this album, but I'm pretty sure I hear him in a supporting role on this track as well.

I think this song is "low-hanging fruit" for some band to revisit today and hit big with.

Can't Afford No Shoes, Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention (1975, from "One Size Fits All," reissued as RykoDisc RCD10095), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Update: clarifying edits made to the first narrative paragraph in response to commenters. Thanks, commenters!!!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Momma was flattenin' lard with her red enamel rolling pin



On the way home tonight I heard on the radio that Captain Beefheart had died. It made me sad.

Beefheart, whose "straight" name was Don Van Vliet (sorta rhymes with fleet), christened his stage persona in honor of an uncle who used to brag that his schlong was the size of a beefheart; Van Vliet and his childhood companions nicknamed His Avuncular Highness "Captain Beefheart."

This tune, from his most influential album, Trout Mask Replica, features Mister Beefheart in what I think of as his radio reporter voice. A more common vocal style he used over the course of his recording career was actually a very profound (and piercing) channeling---not mere imitation---of Howlin' Wolf. (Follow the link provided by "Anonymous" in the comments section if you want to hear an example.) But here, in a suave, well modulated rap not rhythmically tied to the accompaniment very closely, he recites one of his lovely avant-garde poems. Like so many of Beefheart's lyrics, this one is full of vivid and absurd imagery that is not only entertaining on the face of it, but kind of starts making more and more sense with repeated listening. The Magic Band chugs relentlessly beneath the vocal track, sounding very rickety and odd. But, like the lyrics, the music becomes increasingly accessible with each playing.

There are plenty of accounts of Beefheart's important but sporadic lifelong artistic relationship with Frank Zappa, who produced the breakthrough Trout Mask. In many ways, artistically, Beefheart and Zappa perfectly complemented each other. I suspect that most of the regrettable personal problems between the two were driven by Zappa's need for ego dominance and recognition as the sole genius behind any project he was involved in. (Zappa is a major hero of mine, but one who wore two enormous feet of clay.) And it also seems obvious to me that Zappa's own lyrics owe much, much more to Beefheart's influence than he ever acknowledged. Also, Beefheart was notoriously poor at remembering the words to songs in live performance, and often got lost even when he was holding the lyrics right in front of him. You can hear this in a number of places on the 1975 Zappa/Beefheart album that centers on a live performance in Austin, Texas. This Beefheart idiosyncrasy must have made a maniac of Zappa, who was a tyrannical perfectionist and control freak.

Anyway, I earnestly hope that the good captain has ascended to a plane of existence where the poetic phrases he utters are instantly rendered into arabesques of painterly visual reality along the lines of the canvasses to which he dedicated the latter part of his career... and vice versa.

Old Fart At Play, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band (1969, from "Trout Mask Replica," reissued as Reprise Records 2027-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Well, it's not exactly an early 1970s Thanksgiving night at Roosevelt Auditorium, but here's something pretty-sounding for Gurlitzer's purfoot of happineff by a gentleman who used to perform at that same venue, but on Halloween night, during that same timeframe.



I think Zappa secretly adored his own beautiful, emotive compositions and performances, but publicly disowned that side of his musical personality for some twisted, unnecessary reason. Unexpectedly, this is a cut you need to turn up to 11 after you jam your little earbuds into those holes in either side of your head. There's lots of understated studio magic going on, from the round, lazy driving of the bass to the effortless use of gentle acoustic and aggressive electric guitar sounds side by side in a big, ethereal acoustic domain. The idiosyncratic time signatures that he cuts in here and there further enhance the loveliness instead of pushing it off balance. And if you don't listen closely, you might miss the marimba fluttering underneath it all, rolling and arpeggiating like butterflies. It's hard for me to understand why Frank didn't push a few tracks like this out into the AOR FM "product channel." Would damage his cred as a Freak, I guess.

Zoot Allures, Frank Zappa (1976, "Zoot Allures," 1990 reissue, RykoDisc RCD 10160), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Due process: a fading memory to "Constitution buffs"

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For the umpty-ninth time, tonight on NPR this time, I heard some belligerent-sounding asshole at a Nevada state Republican party convention bluster about how sick he is of government not following the Constitution. Predictably, he was speaking in the context of right-wing outrage about the "government takeover" of healthcare. The reporter, of course, failed to ask old Chamber-Of-Commerce Dick if he was aware that the legislation was passed and signed by a duly elected Congress and President, respectively, and has not been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Well, OK, the guy is entitled to an ignorant opinion. Sound bytes like I described above wouldn't souse me with hate, though, if these same people were also blathering on the news shows about things like this --- Soviet-style security policies that vomit on due process (a Constitution thing, you know) when a licensed commercial pilot declines to submit to a "backscatter" full body scan after clearing an airport metal detector. These scans are capable of clearly imaging a subject's genetalia and other mammalian protuberances, and in the absence of reasonable suspicion related to smuggling nonmetallic weapons or ingested cocaine-stuffed condoms, are useless except for titillating bored TSA workers. So... why chorus of silence, wingnuts?

It's almost as if Republicans, libertarians, and Tea Partiers are angry only about things they're told to be angry about.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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As Hedley Lamarr once said, "My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives."



Just cuz! An all-too-rare specimen of Lummox Rock from Frank Zappa leading (in my opinion) his best band ever, period. (Thank you for your attention to this matter.) As much as I love Zappa, I feel he spent way too much time expressing obscenity, disrespect for women, and pointless vulgarity. This performance, however, is not any of those: it's a straightforward and witty expression of an ultra-lewd sentiment that probably has overtaken every gentleman reading these words at a certain point. I'd be very interested to hear any version of this viewpoint as expressed musically from the female point of view, preferably in a Lummox Rock format. In fact, I may know of one from the '90s, but that will have to wait. Meanwhile, if you know of any, do tell.

And as with all Lummox Rock, plug in your headphones and turn it up louder than you can stand. Just fuckin' do it!

Dirty Love, The Mothers (1973, from "Over-Nite Sensation," DiscReet MS 2149), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Let's make the water turn black

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Our finer citizens, many of whom believe that homos cause hurricanes, may need to consider how cute it is to chant "Drill Baby Drill." It's not cute: it's monstrous.

The drip drip drip of analysis (which BP surely knew two weeks ago) indicates that this disaster is on deck to be America's largest water pollution catastrophe, as projected in this NOLA Times-Picayune graph. I think Russia is still way ahead with China a natural favorite in the coming two decades, if that makes you feel any better. And anyway, don't worry: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is "losing patience," so we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So imagine the eastern Gulf of Mexico, with toxic fisheries and black, gooey beaches writhing with dying birds. Then consider the hypoxic dead zone in the northwestern gulf, made possible by petrochemical companies, agribusiness, and luxuriant suburban lawns. Heckuva job, trickle-downers. I wonder if our finer citizens will ever understand that hurricanes are not caused by homos, but by Republicans. (Volcanos, too.)

"To some it might seem creepy what they do."



(Composition by Frank Zappa for a Cousteau Society documentary, via YouTube, performed by Ensemble Modern.)

It's Bedtime!

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Apropos of nothing: RIP Chris Kanyon and Herb Cohen.

Kanyon was a minor figure during the WCW "invasion" of the WWF back around the turn of the century, when professional wrestling was still entertaining. Beer-D reminded me that he was mainly known for entering the ring spouting some sort of lame monologue that ended with the rhetorical question "Who better than Kanyon?" Then, just about anyone would enter the ring and kick is ass seven ways for Sunday. It was his role. HuffingtonPost wants to make something of the fact that he was openly gay, but I doubt that gayness is particularly rare in the wrestling racket. In fact, gayness (and gaylike styling weirdness) were professional wrestling conventions for awhile, and treated in a fairly matter-of-fact manner insofar as opponents of the gay characters never resorted to any particularly homophobic invective. Professional wrestling must be one of the hardest things in the world to do, and "detraining" from it has to be much more complex than retiring from a mainstream athletic career due to the toll of steroids and brutal physical punishment. Peace, Chris.

Herb "Herbie" Cohen was a picaresque character, evidently capable of being a major league motherfucker, who was tightly enmeshed in the careers of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits, plus a menagerie of unlikely lesser lights. The Barry Miles critical biography of Zappa tells of Herbie's alleged mismanagement of and skimming from Zappa's various record labels, not to mention a previous career selling weapons of war to African insurgencies and manning the barricades for the Mothers of Invention at a 1969 Berlin concert in which the Baader-Meinhof Gang (aka the Red Army Faction) turned things very scary for the group. Herbie was the subject of many in-jokes on Zappa's albums from the '70s, but they eventually had a non-amicable parting of the ways late in the decade. You can see Herbie rising like a wraith from a crack in the pavement in the surreal wraparound painting (verso) for the cover of Zappa's 1973 Over-Nite Sensation. Now he's a wraith for real.

Oh, and get back to bed! I don't wanna hear a peep outta ya! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Above Top Secret

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Items like this give me the willies. Few remember today what Daniel Ellsberg is remembered for. [Editor's note: the previous sentence is lexical nonsense, but it has a nice Yogi Berra feel to it, so we'll keep it intact and start over with a new paragraph.]

I think it's accurate to say that most people today don't really understand what Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg did to become famous starting in 1969, but when I read about it as a mature adult it's truly a mind-blower. You don't have to be anyone special to get a Top Secret clearance, you only have to demonstrate a need to know information classified at that level and convince a nice FBI agent that you're not a current or potential traitor, or highly susceptible to bribery or blackmail by one. So it seems reasonable to me that there must be at least some levels above Top. If Ellsberg says there were 10 levels above when he provided orientation for new National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger --- and I don't know of any reason to doubt him --- then maybe now there are 15 or 20.

It's a shibboleth of conventional wisdom, smugly accepted by everyone from Josh Marshall to Glenn Beck, that people who suspect that some national events are shaped by large conspiracies are "conspiracy theorists," and that "conspiracy theorists" are ipso facto lunatics. Therefore, all reasonable adults know that grand covert conspiracies could never take place because that would just be crazy. The conspiracy to conceal the truth about the unwinnable Vietnam War from the public never happened, and neither did the conspiracy to cover up the Watergate burglary. The Warren Commission Report fully explains away compelling visual forensic evidence of a President's murder that we all can see with our own two lying eyes. And all of the questions raised by theologian David Ray Griffin in his densely footnoted 9/11 Contradictions are "spurious" just because some of them are. Good thinking!

Just to avoid being misunderstood, like every other responsible adult I'm aware that the country is full of conspiracy nuts. But just what exactly do we suppose is locked away in those Armageddon-proof safes where the Top+10 files are archived?

Fuck it. I'm heading for The Saturday Night Fish Fry!

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Now this is what life is all about: Frank Zappa and the "Roxy" Mothers providing a classic primer on "imaginary diseases" (as Frank used to call things like smelly feet and BO). I saw this band and several variants five or six times between 1973 and 1975, including this very lineup in Bloomington, Ill. He even makes a reference to Tom Waits, who was opening for FZ when "Heart of Saturday Night" was released. The deliciously average-looking Ruth Underwood is shown here wearing only a bra on top, but not because it was her custom to dress like a "ho." It's because it gets pretty fucking hot under stage lighting, especially when you're darting around like a whirling dervish between 10 linear yards of mallet percussion instruments, drums, cymbals, and what-have-you. In Bloomington (1974) they had to briefly pause the show because she fainted due to overheating (after her solo on "Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?" I think).



I think this video comes from Zappa's Dub Room Special DVD. The performance, probably from the 1974 Roxy shows, is extra-nice for several reasons. First, it's not rushed in tempo, which was a classic Zappa shortcoming in latter-year live performances. Second, this version isn't retrofitted with AAAFNRA* litter, which Zappa continually did to keep things interesting for himself during nonstop touring, yet he does tweak the lyric to acknowledge the presence of Waits backstage, keeping things spontaneous. And third, FZ edited in some claymation by Bruce Bickford, who seems to be as closely in touch with his own id as Robert Crumb. This animated video flourish is, in my opinion, an example of AAAFNRA at its best.
                                                
* Unfortunately for many fans, including me, these ad hoc AAAFNRA modifications to lyrics, melodies, and arrangements often amounted to little more than in jokes for the band or weak second thoughts on how to present the original piece.

Reading recommendation

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Here's a blog I like --- the guy has been on fire lately.

The sanctity of contracts [updated]

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Today on All Things Considered I heard some New York Times reporter named "Andrew Ross Sorkin" try packaging a lame apologia for criminally incompetent executives as good old American contrarian horse-sense. His point seems to be that the government can't just "rip up contracts" because we have laws, and therefore AIGFP retention bonuses (for example) "must" be paid if we (we-who, he didn't say) are to retain the fabric of trust in society. Or something.

To her credit, ATC co-host Melissa Block quizzed this fool about the difference between ripping up AIGFP executive bonus contracts and ripping up union contracts as part of the in-progress auto industry bailout. But I wish she would have told him that nobody is literally expecting the government to "rip up contracts." By failing to follow up insistently to question Sorkin's premise, she allowed him to waste 3 minutes of my time in the car that I could have been listening to "Playground Psychotics." Meanwhile, Sorkin explained to all us rubes that "we" really need to keep these AIGFP execs on board because they're the only ones how know how to "unwind" the exotic derivative securities that they conjured. Yes: they need to be paid excessive bonuses in addition to their salaries so they will continue to do the jobs they are contractually obligated to perform.

See, the way I process this in my cinder of a brain, I am convinced that both parties to an emploment contract need to honor said contract. Therefore, before we hear any more horseshit like this from reporter Sorkin, he needs to employ the Google, Nexis and Lexis, his telephone, and his Outlook address book to find out for the American public (who is an 80 percent majority shareholder in AIG) whether the AIGFP bonus recipients did in fact fulfill the terms of their contract. If he's too frightened, lazy, or unskilled to do that, then he could at least check TPM a few times a day to keep up with the facts of the story... just for appearances.

When it's time to unwind" the AIGFP mystery securities portfolio for real, we AIG majority shareholders won't need to pamper and coax reporter Sorkin's smarmy MBA pals to do that job. We will go to the real experts: auditors, bank examiners, criminal investigators, and federal prosecutors.

Update: that cute little Ezra Klein addressed a similar topic today, referencing Sorkin's NYT column as source material. There's a bit of ambiguity in his point, however, possibly due to the lack of vetting his text through a simple country editor. To make up for the ambiguity, there are a number of interesting remarks in the comments thread below the post. No, we can't confiscate money from a small, specific group of people without any valid legal framework. Yes, there are many possible ways to approach the quashing of the AIGFP bonuses, such as legislation about executive bonuses working in corporations that have accepted TARP funds or giving AIG a friendly reminder that they're fucking bankrupt and must settle up with a long line of customers and shareholders before making good on contracts that rewarded gross mismanagement or worse. One commenter suggests freezing the accounts out of which executive bonuses are to be paid pending the outcome of a fraud investigation; I like that one.