Frank Zappa- Hot Rats

With a man like Frank Zappa, it's impossible to pick a single album to represent the entire body of work. For our purposes, we'll pick his best regarded and fairly accessible 1969 release Hot Rats. At this point in his career, Zappa has dissolved the first lineup of the Mothers of Invention, and wanted to move on. He did so by ditching his short, satirical bites of sound and opting for a nearly instrumental mix of Early Jazz Fusion and Early Progressive Rock. He has many guests assisting him here, including ex-Mother Ian Underwood on sax and Captain Beefheart on the record's only vocal. Another notable thing about this album is it's one of the first to use a 16 track recording system, furthering the complexity of the music industry.

The first song is the short but sweet "Peaches in Regalia", a jazzy track with horns and guitar distortion. It has lots of little phrases that work together to form an extremely catchy melody. There even seems to be a bit of Indian influence in the rhythm structure. After that, there's the sensational 9-minute hard rock song "Willie The Pimp", which starts off with Beefheart's raspy, gritty vocal (the only one on the album) and a fiddle. From there, things get (more) intense, and Zappa ends up giving us a phenomenal seven minute guitar solo. That's about it. This track is one that absolutely must be heard in its full glory. Rounding out the A side is another 9 minute song, "Son of Mr. Green Jeans". This one is a much more mellow, with more horns ans a jazz rock feel. The track was actually a reworking of the earlier "Mr. Green Jeans" on the Uncle Meat album.

Another quickie starts of side B, "Little Umbrellas." It's got stacks ans stacks of overdubs by Underwood, and is a mellow lounge-jazzy track. Not the album's best, but nice nonetheless. Next up comes another one of the album's long centerpieces, "The Gumbo Variations". For this cut, there's lots of guitar and saxophone doing work, and the mix of jazz fusion and blues rock influences is quite apparent. It meanders over its 16 minutes, but it's got some good structural developments. Lastly, "It Must Be a Camel" plays, and it follows a similar pattern to "Peaches" and "Umbrellas". The most notable feature is the jumps in melody, which create "Camel Humps" in the sheet music.

Hot Rats is a record that goes all over the place. Zappa plays around with all kinds of instruments, melodies, and harmonies, and out of it comes something that is quite unique. While there may be a dud section here and there, almost all of the experiments are successes, with hours and hours of fun for a music theory student to pick apart. Though it's a bit lopsided, with a stacked A side and a just-good B-Side, it doesn't suffer from record fatigue. Defiantly a 7 on the complexity scale. One word to the wise: the CD and Vinyl mixes of this album are different, and there's big debate as to which is superior.

This one is one of those albums that pulls you in and keeps you enticed through many many listens, with some new feature every time. Grade: A+