Even think I go to praying
Every time I hear them saying
That there’s no way to delay
That trouble coming every day
No way to delay
Trouble coming every day
This is the album that introduced the world to the strange and singular figure of Frank Zappa; I’m about to start a bit of a Zappa project in honor of the new documentary, Eat That Question. Zappa’s a hole in my musical knowledge/experience, so I’m looking forward to going through a lot of his discography. This is both a debut album and a double album and it falls into the traps of both of those things. Zappa’s obviously experimenting heavily with this album; the last third of the album is essentially one long, super-experimental track. Help, I’m a Rock/It Can’t Happen Hear is nearly nine minutes in length and the final track The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet is a bit over twelve minutes. Those twenty minutes or so of the album are . . . basically unlistenable, a lot of discordant chaos and sped up tape and people screaming and, um, yeah. Zappa’s trying things, but the album is better when he’s just tweaking things a bit, but maintaining some level of conventional musicality. Trouble Every Day is a frantic effort, a strange, somewhat distorted take on electric blues; it was written in response to the Watts riots and so it has the most immediacy and the least satirical distance of any of the songs here and it’s by far the best. It remains somewhat chilling, certainly, that its fifty-year-old (!) take on racial tension and violence seems ripped from the headlines of today. But as much as Zappa wants to satirize or subvert pop music, you can already see that he has a talent for it. The song Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder is an obvious parody of fifties teen romance songs, but it works as a straight song just as well as it does a parody. You can see those same talents creeping, despite his best efforts, into other songs here: Any Way the Wind Blows & You Didn’t Try to Call Me, most notably. But Zappa succeeds at throwing a boulder into a still pond; a lot of the music is raw and sloppy with distorted sound and about a third of the album shouldn’t even be classified music if you ask me. It’s more avant-garde spoken word. When it works, it’s good or, in the case of Trouble Every Day, even great. But Zappa isn’t interested in making “good” music yet; this album is unpleasant in a lot of ways and downright annoying in others – and it’s exactly what Zappa wanted, in general terms. It’s a bold way to open a career, if not a suicidal one. It’s up to you whether you think it’s admirable or idiotic that Zappa steadfastly refused to make an album that people would, you know, like. Even if you do find it admirable, you still don’t listen to Monster Magnet much, I’ll bet. Consider yourself introduced, Mr. Zappa. Now get on with doing something a lot better than this. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – a few songs succeed, but this double album debut has a lot of filler and Zappa’s experimental tracks are downright terrible. 1 ½ stars.