Gary SteelFrank Zappa – Apostrophe (’) 50th Anniversary Edition (Zappa/Universal)
Frank Zappa’s most popular album gets a chunky six-disc elaboration. GARY STEEL wonders whether it warrants the attention.
I can still remember my bemusement when I put Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe (’) on my happy platter for the first time. I was 15, it was 1974 and this wasn’t what I’d signed up for. Earlier in the year I’d revelled in the mutant jazz of The Grand Wazoo (1972) and identified with the revolutionary freak-rock manifesto of Absolutely Free (1967) and was thirsty for more of the seemingly boundless creativity of those two discoveries.
The problem wasn’t that Apostrophe (’) came from yet another of Zappa’s universes – I relished his eclecticism – but that it sounded like a novelty record.
Sure, I’d grown up appreciating Spike Jones and his City Slickers and as a boy sang along to novelty hits like ‘The Purple People Eater’ and ‘Witch Doctor’ and ‘Monster Mash’, but while my first clutch of Zappa records certainly displayed a robust sense of humour, they were also clearly more than that too. In the space of just a few months I’d soaked in a conceptually fascinating and musically complex big-band meets rock power record (The Grand Wazoo) and one of the most salient, wilting critiques of consumer society (Absolutely Free) and now I was listening to cartoon-like ditties about husky wee-wee and stinky feet? At the age of 15, that my rock gods didn’t sell out was of paramount importance, and it felt to me that Apostrophe (’) was a compromise.
While it’s never been one of my favourite Zappa albums, over the years I’ve come to appreciate Apostrophe (’) and, along with the beautifully sleazy grooves of its predecessor, Over-Nite Sensation (1973), I find that it’s one of the more enduring long players in the FZ catalogue. While it’s an easy target for Zappa denigrators because of its intentionally silly humour, fans soon come to understand that one of the key ideas behind Zappa’s art is the emotional and musical plurality in his music.
It’s fair to say that consumers expect one overriding mood from music because that’s what they mostly get. This gives them a clear cue for a set emotional response. Those looking for a straightforward emotional and musical statement should look elsewhere. Zappa’s radicalism partly resides in this stubborn unwillingness to be just one thing.
But what is at the core of Apostrophe (’) and why is it still worthy of our attention 50 years after its initial release? As Simon Prentis writes in his excellent liner notes, “Its many dazzling episodes of aural invention are matched with equally dizzying moments of lyrical delight, their core themes cloaked in FZ’s favoured garb of absurdity – all delivered by Zappa himself in an electrifying display of verbal dexterity.” I should mention that Prentis is the respected author of books like Speech: How Language Made Us Human, so he’s well qualified to pass judgment on Zappa’s literary and verbal acuity.
On Over-Nite Sensation, FZ had mastered a kind of proto-rap style of narration that he carried through to Apostrophe (’), and specifically the lead cut, ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’, an unintended radio hit that sent the album into the Top 10. While Zappa was an admired “musician’s musician” his commercial success was generally negligible, so the financial rewards reaped by Apostrophe (’) kept him solvent through the ‘70s. Who would begrudge him that?
When I first encountered Apostrophe (’) it seemed a world away from The Grand Wazoo but parts of it were recorded only a year later and it featured many of the same musicians: incredible players like George Duke (keyboards), Aynsley Dunbar (drums), Jean-Luc Ponty (violin), Sal Marquez (trumpet) and Ruth Underwood (percussion). Bend your ear to listen to the intricate charts and rhythms under the silly words and you’ll be amazed. It’s all there. Zappa achieved the seemingly impossible by fusing a story that appealed to the sensibilities of the time onto a conceptual suite that was just as musically audacious as anything he’d done before, if not quite as freaky or underground.
I’ll write in more detail about the specifics of Apostrophe (’) elsewhere but one key takeaway of Side 1 of the original album is that the ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’ suite is a great revenge story where a nasty baby seal killer gets the yellow snow (“where the huskies go”) rubbed into his eyes and then, um… finds salvation, of sorts. Another is that this is also where Zappa the guitar hero really got going. His trebly bee-sting, hair-raising fast guitar stabs were a sensation in themselves. He’d been playing that Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson-influenced style for years, but here it was in just the right context to create a legend.
And then the album gets arguably even more arresting with the classic ‘Cosmik Debris’, another revenge story but this time against the hippy snake-oil salesmen prevalent in the early ‘70s. It’s a concise statement at only 4 minutes and 18 seconds and contains a sizzling guitar solo to boot. (Reading daughter Moon Zappa’s memoir, it’s hard not to see the song as a comment on Frank’s wife Gail’s belief in hippy/new age/spiritual junk).
The title tune is a grinding, riff-heavy six-minute jam with the fated Jim Gordon on drums and featuring Cream’s bassist Jack Bruce going hog-wild in the upper registers of his instrument. In other words, it’s quite unlike anything else on the album.
The other two most notable pieces are ‘Uncle Remus’ and ‘Stink-Foot’, the former one of the few songs Zappa ever shared a co-write with. Although not explicitly stated, it’s believed that Duke largely wrote the tune and Zappa the words to this reflection on the difficulties the civil rights movement was going through at the time. It’s the only properly sober moment on the album. ‘Stink-Foot’, which came out of jamming on an old blues song, at first seems one of the more throwaway Zappa songs, but it’s rapped lyrics lay out some of the ideas that took hold in Zappa mythology, notably ideas like his much-discussed “conceptual continuity” and even the importance of the apostrophe in language. In a world where apostrophes are commonly abandoned, it’s somehow gratifying to see it used with abandon on ‘Stink-Foot’ and, indeed, the album title itself.
So, what does this new version of Apostrophe (’) sound like? Well, I never much liked the sound of the album, but for years I was stuck with a New Zealand pressing of the original album. Later, I bought an American pressing, and what a profound difference. I compared that to this new Bernie Grundman remastering and they both sound great. The difference is that both on the new CD and online streaming at 96kHz and 192kHz (Qobuz), it just sounds so present and crunchy and so very detailed. I’ve never been happy with previous CDs of the album, which sounded quite flat and a little harsh, so the new mix is something of a revelation.
The box set (which is diminutive and only just big enough to fit the six discs) is rather expensive, so what’s the incentive to fork out for it?
Disc 1 contains the remastered album and an “Album Session Bonus”, meaning a bunch of outtakes and different versions that give us hardened Zappa freaks more contextual understanding. Disc 2 and 3 catch Zappa’s band in action in Colorado on 21 March 1974, before the album’s release. There are many superb moments but unfortunately, the audio quality is raw. The feel of it all is wonderfully spontaneous though, and unlike some FZ lineups (especially in the ‘80s) the tightness doesn’t drain all the spunk out. Maybe because the gig took place before Apostrophe (’) was released the stakes weren’t so high and maybe Zappa knew that the lineup (which included the return of guitarist Jeff Simmons as well as the double drum trouble of Chester Thompson and Ralph Humphrey) was somewhat transitory. Oddly, there’s only one song from Apostrophe (’) in this set, a bluesy 10-minute jam on ‘Cosmic Debris’. There’s plenty for fans of the mostly-live Roxy & Elsewhere album though, with insanely great versions of ‘Echidna’s Arf’ and ‘Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?’ Listening to these selections reminded me of why this era is such a favourite of FZ fans because there’s a joyous sense of fun permeating through but more importantly, more so than earlier or later Zappa bands the music can switch from extremely precise and virtuosic composed passages to sweaty blues and funky rock in less than the blink of an eye.
The big surprise is that they’re already performing some selections from albums that were barely a twinkle in Frank’s eye in early ’74. There are a couple of selections from the album that was to become a real Zappa favourite, One Size Fits All (1975), and it’s fascinating to hear how different they are. ‘Is There Anything Good Inside Of You’ was renamed ‘Andy’ for that album and in just over half the 11-minute running time of this sprawling live rendition the studio version is infinitely more realized. Then there are all 19 minutes of ‘Dupree’s Paradise’, which eventually wound up on FZ’s Boulez Conducts Zappa (1984), but here is almost unrecognizable as a fluty groove session.
Moving along to Disc 4, the set’s compilers decided to include a Salt Lake City performance of ‘Inca Roads’ to fully represent the setlist at the time, as the tape on the Colorado gig had run out before this epic song was performed. Nothing can beat the superlative performance of this all-time great composition on One Size Fits All, and both the very average sound quality and the comparatively tentative performances somewhat hinder one’s enjoyment of the track.
From here, however, we’re straight into a crystal-clear recording of a Dayton, Ohio gig from November of the same year, and the difference is startling. Despite having shed a drummer, a guitarist and a trombonist, this pared-down group is at the top of their game and sounds confident and on fire, very possibly buoyed by the chart success of the album and renewed excitement from fans in the live arena.
Needless to say, as with the Colorado performance there’s some fine fretboard mangling, but unlike that poor-quality tape everything is beautifully captured here, including Tom Fowler’s fine bass articulations and Chester Thompson’s grandstanding stereo drum parts. Zappa must have realized just what a phenomenal percussionist he was as he’s allowed several solos.
Once again, standbys like ‘Echidna’s Arf’, ‘Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?’ and ‘Pygmy Twylite’ get the full treatment, managing to incorporate some exquisite soloing as well as frequent spontaneous interruptions. Zappa got tired very quickly of having to perform the very naughty ‘Dinah-Moe Hum’ to audiences braying for it, but the 9-minute version here is fun, as he encourages audience participation: “We just want you all to come at the same time in the middle of this song. Some of you seem a bit unsure. Maybe it would be different if I was David Bowie.” And an instrumental fury ensues as Frank urges the audience to help each other get off!
The last part of the gig is an almost perfectly sequenced rendition of the ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’ suite, and that’s it. The final section of the CD is called More Bonus Swill and consists of ephemera like the audio of the Apostrophe (’) TV ad, finishing with the cartoon voices singing “The poodle bites/The poodle chews it” at the end of ‘Stinkfoot’. After which Zappa says: “You know there’s a lot of people who think I was completely stupid for doing a song like this.”
And then there’s the final disc, a Blu-ray containing Dolby Atmos, Dolby TrueHD, the original Quadraphonic mix and hi-res PCM stereo mixes of the album. Unfortunately, I don’t have the technology for surround sound, but I can report that the stereo BD disc is nicely authored with a constantly changing set of Zappa (and band) pics and a real-time moving shot of a turntable playing Apostrophe (’).
The booklet is very nice with Simon Prentis’s fabulous song-by-song essay, some very nice pics and of course, the lyrics in full.
Unfortunately, Apostrophe (’) proved to be a commercial fluke for Frank Zappa and neither Bongo Fury (a live album with Captain Beefheart on vocals) or the insanely great One Size Fits All, which followed it, caught the public’s imagination. And by ’76 he was in strife with his manager and suing his distribution company, Warners. Although he eventually won the rights to his entire back catalogue, the litigation held up releases for years and saw many of his albums fall into cut-out/deletion bins and subsequent unavailability.
Listening to the approximately 30 minutes of the original Apostrophe (’) album in 2024 I’m struck by how fresh it sounds and find myself amazed at how this crazy record ever became a hit because despite its novel nature, it’s defiantly uncommercial. For me, Apostrophe (’) is still a whole lot of fun. The box set is fun for Zappa scholars and those who have to have it all, but there’s a lifetime of repeat listens in just that brief original recording.
+ Frank Zappa – Apostrophe (’) 50th Anniversary Edition was reviewed on CD and on a 96kHz 24bit FLAC file via Qobuz.
