So Frank Zappa makes his grand entrance with Freak Out!, an influential bloated double-LP of sarcastic teenager anthems, social commentary, and aggressive, psychedelic meanderings and noodlings. He did what he needed to do, and now he can quit the music business forever and fade into obscurity.
Or he can make another three trillion albums over the next 25 years instead. Absolutely Free is the second album by Frank Zappa and his merry men the Mothers of Invention, and hoo boy is it a humdinger of an album! 45 minutes of duck calls! The grooves of each and every copy of the vinyl record were personally carved out by Frank's dick!
Sorry to disappoint you like that. What he have here is a single-LP of more weirdo social statements broken into very loose themes between the two sides. Musically, there's a noticeable enhancement of production and diversity. While most of Freak Out! sounded kind of samey, Absolutely Free is a cavalcade of shifting genres, fluttering woodwind instruments, and bizarro abstract lyrical ventures. In fact, even after multiple listens it's a very all-over-the-place and jarring album, but don't mistake this for a complaint. It's a fun album throughout.
Side 1 kicks off with "Plastic People", a bastardized pseudo-version of "Louie, Louie" (not even the first reference to "Louie, Louie" in the official catalog, and certainly not the last). Here, Frank is making fun of self-absorbed types, and the social commentary gets more convoluted as we progress. Talks of vegetables wrapped in oblique lyrical nonsense abound the first side of the album, but you don't need to know what they're talking about to enjoy it. Prunes, cabbage, rutabaga, pumpkin, all symbolizing...what? Who gives a fuck, just sit back and enjoy the schizophrenic progression. See if you can spot little quotes and segments from classical composers such as Stravinsky and Holst, Frank loved to pepper his own compositions with this kind of shit. It gives it an eloquent and sophisticated touch that is completely undermined by the stupidity of the words, and we all know about Frank Zappa's knack for subverting expectations. My favorite part of the whole goddamn album is the seven-minute acid-blues jam "Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin", which intersperses furious guitar with a medieval folksy fife or something. It's a beautiful thing. The main criticism you'll see about Side 1 is that melody and hooks are sacrificed for weirdness and musical passages that run on a little too long, but these people are chumps.
No metaphorical vegetables on Side 2, which kicks off with "America Drinks". The lyric "you came on strong, with your fast car and your class ring" pops in, so, again, we're going to deal with some lampooning of trivial teenager issues. By now, Frank's about 26 or 27 years old, so it's a little strange to me how fixated he is with teenage social issues. I'm guessing ol' Frankie got his ass kicked in high school a fair number of times. It continues with "Status Back Baby" ("I'm losing status at the high school..."), but then movies on to political/marketing satire on "Uncle Bernie's Farm". The real treat here, and a favorite among Zappa fans, is "Brown Shoes Don't Make It". It's a seven-minute piece basically about politicians fucking their 13-year-old daughters, which is as quaint of subject matter as anything else I'm sure, but the song basically consists of musical vignettes strung together. It's often cited as the first of its kind in rock music history, and such a song would prove to be a major influence to the experimental Mike Patton/John Zorn types who like to shift genres on a dime within one song (Mr. Bungle, anyone?). The album closes out with "America Drinks and Goes Home", which bookends Side 2 with a lounge version of "America Drinks", and a fine note to end on indeed.
Historically speaking, as far the the "trilogy" of the early Frank + Mothers albums go, this one is the least significant, and gets forgotten by casual listeners since it's sandwiched between Freak Out! and We're Only in It for the Money. Myself, I used to think I preferred this one, but ultimately I listen to it a lot less than Freak Out! which I think takes the Gold when comparing the three. People may gripe that I personally would give We're Only in It for the Money the Bronze. Fuck 'em.
GOOD
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