OVER-NITE SENSATION
ZAPPA’S BREAKTHROUGH
Frank Zappa was already a phenomenon when, in September 1973, an album appeared that was completely different from anything he had made up to that point. OVER-NITE SENSATION is not generally regarded as his most important work, but it does mark the beginning of a series of highlights in his career. This is the fourth contribution by Wim Bot and Peter de Ruiter to a series in which groundbreaking albums or concerts from half a century ago form the common thread. Earlier articles dealt with Hendrix’s brilliant live performance of Machine Gun, L.A. Woman by The Doors, and the groundbreaking debut album by Roxy Music.
Thirty years after his premature death from prostate cancer at the age of 52, Frank Zappa (1940–1993) remains a controversial figure, with a large and loyal following on the one hand and people who consider him arrogant and overrated on the other. But above all, there are many people who have little affinity with his music.
Zappa’s music can really only be understood if you know that he saw himself primarily as an American composer, rather than as a rock star or guitarist. A composer who often conducted his own band on stage. And American: his work, full of complex rhythms — Zappa began as a drummer — was inspired by virtually every American musical tradition, from his idol Edgar Varèse (1883–1965), the avant-garde French-American composer, to doo-wop, rhythm and blues and jazz. His lyrics are full of wordplay and references and can only be fully understood through a profound knowledge of popular American culture. The result is a completely individual musical universe. As percussionist Ruth Underwood, who was a friend of his, put it: “What kind of music is that? Classical? No. Rock? No. Jazz? No. It’s Zappa.”
The album lasts less than 35 minutes, but with OVER-NITE SENSATION Frank Zappa took a surprisingly new direction. It was a break with his earlier albums. There are none of the long, experimental soundscapes from the early Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention period, such as the twelve-minute The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet from the debut album FREAK OUT! (1966). There are no full-side, cabaret-like performances such as Billy the Mountain from JUST ANOTHER BAND FROM L.A. (1972), performed by The Mothers with the much-praised Turtles duo Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (Flo & Eddie).
Nor is there chamber jazz such as on Zappa’s second solo album HOT RATS (1969), or the exuberant big-band jazz-rock of WAKA/JAWAKA (1972) and THE GRAND WAZOO (also 1972). No: seven relatively short, intense, punchy, fairly accessible and, for their time, crystal-clear recordings in a funky and jazzy rock idiom, packed with musical ideas. And ideas were something Zappa had in abundance from the very beginning of his tumultuous career.
Part of the rock press reacted extremely negatively to the album. Rolling Stone critic Arthur Schmidt was annoyed by its obsession with sex and called Zappa a “spent force.” Journalist Robert Christgau focused solely on the lyrical and musical irony and missed the “serious material.” And Briton Charles Shaar Murray wrote in New Musical Express that the album contained charming songs decorated with all kinds of musical attention-grabbers, “but it is certainly not one of Zappa’s most convincing efforts.” Later, he also criticized Zappa’s vulgar commercialism compared with his early albums.
In the Netherlands, reactions were mixed. Limburgsch Dagblad found the album a major disappointment; De Tijd thought it much more popular and understandable than was usual for Zappa; NRC Handelsblad spoke of “lots of jokes, lots of sex, lots of brilliant music,” while Trouw described it as pleasantly chaotic. The most extensive and nuanced review was by pop critic Elly de Waard in de Volkskrant on 8 September 1973, an article unfortunately not included in her substantial and attractive collection Het jasje van David Bowie (2015). De Waard considered OVER-NITE SENSATION better than the jazz-rock albums WAKA/JAWAKA and THE GRAND WAZOO, which she regarded as dull. Instrumentally, she found the new album virtuosic, although too complicated and heavy in its execution, but her final conclusion was that it was highly surprising.
Zappa’s fans were considerably less divided and embraced the album immediately. It also earned Zappa a substantial number of new fans. Before OVER-NITE SENSATION, he had been mainly popular in the alternative scene from which he himself had emerged. Only the jazzy HOT RATS had enjoyed wider popularity. OVER-NITE SENSATION remained in the US charts throughout the year and reached number 36, higher than Zappa had ever reached before. Songs from the album were performed live on every tour and became audience favourites. Thus I’m the Slime was still being sung loudly by young and older fans during son Dweezil Zappa’s last visit to the Netherlands in 2019.
OVER-NITE SENSATION was Zappa’s seventeenth album since his debut in 1966 and his first-ever gold record; by the time of his death in 1993, the tally had reached no fewer than 62. That amounts to more than two albums a year. When he was not on the road, he composed day after day, from early morning until late evening, kept going by large quantities of coffee and cigarettes. Drugs were not allowed in Zappa’s home and were not tolerated in his bands either; drug use was grounds for dismissal.
ZAPPA DEMANDED A GREAT DEAL FROM HIS MUSICIANS — NO DETAIL WENT UNHEARD
Musically, too, Zappa demanded a great deal from his musicians. No detail escaped his attention and he could sometimes be almost dictatorial. But what an incredible output. After his death, another 63 albums have been released, many of them live recordings and boxes of studio sessions. Most of these posthumous albums are mainly of interest to hardcore fans and add little to the work Zappa released himself. One exception is the three-disc album FUNKY NOTHINGNESS, released that summer, featuring some great performances of Chunga’s Revenge and surprisingly new material.
Zappa’s albums are characterised by the frequent use of tracks that flow into one another. His entire body of work is regarded as a unity through a “conceptual continuity” that he called “Project/Object,” with numerous musical themes, fragments of lyrics, ideas and characters continually returning. Each album was therefore part of a larger project and, naturally, material for Zappa scholars to interpret.
Permanent Injury
OVER-NITE SENSATION represented a comeback after a personally difficult period for Zappa. On 4 December 1971, his equipment caught fire during a live performance at the Casino in Montreux, Switzerland — an event that entered the history books in particular because of its reference in Deep Purple’s song Smoke on the Water, about the smoke hanging over Lake Geneva. Footage of the event can be found on YouTube. The fire was caused by the carelessness of a member of the audience and cost Zappa $50,000.
Six days later, at London’s Rainbow Theatre, he was pushed from the stage by a jealous audience member, resulting in a temporarily paralysed arm, a broken leg and a damaged larynx. He suffered permanent injuries: one of his legs was shorter than the other, something that is referred to in the songs Zomby Woof and Dancin’ Fool. The following year, from his wheelchair, he made the predominantly instrumental albums WAKA/JAWAKA and THE GRAND WAZOO with jazz musicians, featuring Ainsley Dunbar’s unparalleled drumming. He toured with both a large and a smaller line-up performing this material. The posthumous live releases from these tours sound less convincing than the studio recordings, incidentally. Above all, they demonstrate how magnificent the production was. For true Zappa fans, they rank among his very best albums.
Mothers
At the end of February 1973, Zappa began touring with a colourful group of musicians who left their mark on his sound during these years and whom we also hear on OVER-NITE SENSATION: master keyboard player George Duke (who had already played with the earlier Mothers featuring the Turtles), percussionist Ruth Underwood, her husband and multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood, bassist Tom Fowler, his brother Bruce on trombone, Ralph Humphrey on drums, and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. Sal Marquez was added on trumpet for the album.
This line-up of The Mothers, later supplemented by second drummer Chester Thompson and singer/brass player Napoleon Murphy Brock, who replaced Marquez and Ian Underwood, is regarded by Zappa fans as the best ever — better than The Mothers of the 1960s and the bands from the late 1970s onward.
When the album appeared, Zappa himself remarked:
“The instrumental combinations, the richness of the sound is so strange. The way the songs are delivered, the violins are above or below the chord, the clarinet is in the middle, sometimes alternating with the trombone, and the upper part is usually determined by the marimba or percussion. The drums often play the melody along with the rest. All of this is accompanied by a harmonic line or by doubling the marimba line on a synthesizer. In short, there are many complicated parts that are continually doubling — rhythmically and in other ways.”
Guitar Solos
Anyone who wants to witness how this process took shape and how subtle the instrumentation is can see and experience it in the episode of the documentary series Classic Albums (2007, also available on DVD) devoted to OVER-NITE SENSATION and APOSTROPHE (’), with a starring role for percussion wizard Ruth Underwood on her amplified electric marimba.
In the quotation above, Zappa does not mention his own impressive guitar solos — six in total, all razor-sharp and much less extended than the often overly long solos in his later work. They demonstrate just how great he was as a guitarist, and in our view he deserves a higher position on lists of the greatest guitarists of all time than the 22nd place awarded to him by Rolling Stone magazine in 2011.
Zappa did not see himself as a guitarist who wanted to impress with technical virtuosity, but as a composer who also played guitar. Characteristically, his solos are a collage-like mixture of composition and improvisation, influenced by the rhythm of words and by melody. Guitar Player magazine therefore compares his solos to symphonies, because they build on the melody.
Whatever else may be said, Zappa’s guitar sound is unique and instantly recognisable. He himself said:
“I’m there to play compositions. I want to compose instantly on the guitar. I want to change chords or a harmonic climate and I want to build a composition in the moment that has meaning, that opens up possibilities, that goes somewhere nobody else wanted to go, that says things nobody else wanted to say, that represents my musical personality, that has an emotional content that appeals to people who want to hear that kind of material.”
Songs
OVER-NITE SENSATION opens with the catchy uptempo melody of Camarillo Brillo, with horns, a complex rhythm section, driving drumming by Ralph Humphrey and Zappa’s unmistakable voice, which had become lower as a result of the accident in London. That voice is a major element of the album’s overall sound.
For non-Americans, the references in the lyrics — “is that a real poncho? / mean is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?” — are rather cryptic. Sears is a department store and is contrasted here with something authentically Mexican.
According to Zappa himself, the song is about a particular type of Californian hippie woman with “cartoon hair,” a kind of Afro hairstyle, and an interest in the occult (“She had a snake for a pet and an amulet”); the narrator enters her house and has sex with her.
I’m the Slime is a satirical attack on the dominance of television in the United States and on the all-powerful, intrusive commercial culture. Zappa delivers it in a compelling, impressively low and monotonous voice, as if in a television commercial, creating a fine symbiosis between form and content.
The grimacing face of Zappa on a television set from which slime is dripping is more or less the central motif of the intriguing album cover. The same image was also introduced during the live performance on the television programme Saturday Night Live in 1976.
The iconic album cover was designed by Dave McMacken, who had previously been involved in, among other things, the cover of the double album 200 MOTELS (1971). Zappa asked him to create a realistic design in a so-called “Dutch Master” style, in which all the objects depicted would form part of a larger story. The result was a genuine painting which, although it took several months to arrive, certainly did not disappoint.
The larger story becomes visible when the cover is unfolded. It is an ingenious, surreal-looking composition of a painting in a frame depicting a mirror in an overcrowded hotel room. In the mirror we see a two-headed, moustached road manager, a sturdy brown boot and some underwear (belonging to McMacken), a split-open grapefruit from which dirty juice is flowing, posters, an empty McDonald’s cardboard box, a voltmeter, the Hand of God, which may or may not be replacing a light bulb, a road map of Florida, an organic-mechanical arm driven by a bicycle pedal, complete with muscles and blood vessels, and a hand taking a cigarette from a packet, a glass ashtray and, finally, the television screen with Zappa’s grimacing face, a black-and-white digital print of Rare Meat, taken from the striking cover of 200 MOTELS.
Slime drips from the television, making its way onto a table in the hotel room. Zappa and his band members spent endless amounts of time in hotels and motels, where he wrote many of his songs. All in all, the cover depicts an “over-nite sensation”: an impression of a touring rock band’s Holiday Inn hotel room, filled with sexually charged symbolism, including the grapefruit that was used to provide the crew with an “over-nite sensation” — a roadie’s delight. The bizarre, overcrowded picture frame also explicitly depicts sexual acts.
Perhaps the song Dirty Love refers to such an “over-nite sensation.” It begins with a repetitive riff, contains two Zappa solos and ends, after much panting in the background, with an example of dirty love: oral sex performed on a poodle. The lyrics also include lines taken from commercials for dog food.
To mark its fiftieth anniversary, the album is receiving a deluxe edition in early November: a box containing four CDs and one Blu-ray Audio Disc, with previously unreleased material, alternative versions, live recordings, essays, etc. The box is also being released in a vinyl edition with digital extras.
The first side ends with the crazy Fifty-Fifty, sung by Ricky Lancelotti, who could imitate perhaps a hundred cartoon voices in one minute. His singing borders on the hysterical. The middle section of the song consists of an extraordinary succession of three solos. George Duke starts out on the magnificent pipe organ at Whitney Recording Studio, followed by Jean-Luc Ponty on baritone violin, which he makes sound like a wind instrument. Zappa himself finishes with a vicious guitar solo. Lancelotti then comes back in, while Humphrey and Fowler drive the song towards a spectacular ending with the horns.
Zomby Woof, the first song on side two, is musically the most complicated track on the album, full of unexpected twists and subtle sounds, something of an obstacle course for the musicians. Lancelotti also handles the vocals on this song, which refers to a three-hundred-year-old werewolf. One of the passages was played by the musicians in the studio both forwards and backwards. Zomby Woof ends completely unexpectedly with a kind of thud.
The funky Dinah-Moe Humm is about a woman who, quite audibly, reaches orgasm while watching her sister having sex as well, with an important role for a tool in the form of a pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers. At one point we hear:
“I got a spot that gets me hot / But you ain’t been to it / ’Cause I can’t get into it / Unless I get out of it.”
The album credits do not tell us who was responsible for the backing vocals. Suzanne Piet wrote in De Tijd at the time about “a black female chorus.” But it really was none other than Tina Turner and The Ikettes (Linda Sims and Debby Wilson). Ike Turner had forbidden their participation — for which Zappa paid $25 an hour — from being mentioned.
Tina and The Ikettes can be heard on five of the songs on OVER-NITE SENSATION. In the years that followed, audiences would always call for Dinah-Moe Humm as an encore; musically, however, it is actually the least interesting song on the album.
The final song on the album is another audience favourite, Montana, an absurd country-and-western parody about someone who plans to grow dental floss in that northern state, drives around on a small pony and harvests the floss with — once again — the decorated tweezers.
Zappa clearly had something about dental care. On side three of 200 MOTELS we find the utterly idiotic, Varèse-influenced Dental Hygiene Dilemma, while the cover of UNCLE MEAT features a huge set of teeth.
Montana contains a blistering guitar solo on Zappa’s Gibson SG (“This solo has everything in it I want from life,” said Sifa Graffiti of the video-review duo Sight After Dark), followed by an absurd interlude with Tina Turner and The Ikettes (“I’m pluckin’ the ol’ Dennil Floss / That’s growin’ on the prairie”) and an unforgettable outro with singer Kin Vassy (“Yippy-Ty-O-Ty-Ay!”).
When Tina Turner proudly played the interlude to her husband Ike, pleased that she had pulled it off with The Ikettes, he said, “What kind of crap is that?” and walked away.
Sexist or Sarcastic?
The lyrics on OVER-NITE SENSATION are material for music critics and historians, cultural philosophers, psychologists and linguists. You can see in them an extraordinarily misogynistic, adolescent obsession with sex, always viewed through male eyes, in which women are reduced to objects.
You can also interpret the lyrics as one great ironic commentary on American society and its inhibited attitude towards sex, which forms part of the dominant consumer culture in all kinds of conscious and unconscious ways. This latter approach was developed by Ben Watson in his massive and heavy-going analysis, full of sociological Marxist jargon, Frank Zappa and the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play(1994).
It is clear that an album with lyrics like these would lead to controversy today, not only among conservative Americans — with whom Zappa himself frequently clashed — but also among the progressive “woke” community.
In the second half of the 1980s, Zappa became embroiled in a dispute with the conservative forces of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), led by Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator and Vice President Al Gore. This group campaigned for a system of stickers on albums warning about dangerous and obscene lyrics for young people.
As a libertarian free thinker, Zappa wanted nothing to do with such paternalism. He appeared at a congressional hearing and spoke out against every form of censorship. Zappa would not have been Zappa if he had not used the hearing in a composition: Porn Wars, a Synclavier composition on the album FRANK ZAPPA MEETS THE MOTHERS OF PREVENTION (1985).
Zappa himself always stressed that he wrote the lyrics for his own pleasure, nothing more and nothing less. What makes OVER-NITE SENSATION such a great album is not so much the lyrics themselves, but the way the words form a whole with the music rhythmically and metrically. Everything fits perfectly.
That is why many of Zappa’s compositions can be sung as well as played by different instruments. That does not mean that the lyrics were unimportant, packed as they were with references, symbols and images from American society. Zappa’s lyrics are never personal; even when written in the first person singular, they are never about his own emotions. Zappa is always the observer, the satirist.
The songs that are most personal, and therefore also the most moving, are about his youth and the studios where he began: Village of the Sun, Cucamonga, Joe’s Garage.
Duke and Underwood
OVER-NITE SENSATION marks a new phase in Zappa’s career. Shortly afterwards came APOSTROPHE (’) (1974), the superb live double album ROXY & ELSEWHERE (1974), and ONE SIZE FITS ALL (1975). Songs such as the Yellow Snow Suite, Echidna’s Arf (Of You) / Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing, and Inca Roads rank among the very best things he left behind.
The DVD recording of ROXY & ELSEWHERE shows how much fun Zappa and his musicians were having in this particular configuration of The Mothers. You can see him sitting on stage, smoking and enjoying himself. The film also shows clearly how important George Duke and Ruth Underwood were to the overall sound.
Duke, a powerhouse on electric piano, learned to use the synthesizer and to sing while working with Zappa, and as a jazz musician he brought a swinging funky drive and an additional capacity for improvisation.
The classically trained Ruth Underwood (born Komanoff) had played with Zappa since UNCLE MEAT(1969). As a student at the Juilliard Conservatory in New York, she attended a concert by the early Mothers; she had the feeling that Zappa’s compositions had been written especially for her (“This music was made for ME.”).
A conservative teacher at the conservatory did not appreciate her playing the song Oh No on the piano. Underwood is one of the greatest admirers of Zappa’s music. In Alex Winter’s 2020 documentary she testifies to this and plays a deeply moving piano version of Zappa’s impossible composition The Black Page together with drummer Joe Travers.
And in the aforementioned Classic Albums documentary she plays the breathtakingly fast marimba solo from St. Alphonso’s Pancake Breakfast once again (“Three mistakes, one for each decade I haven’t played it.”).
However good and tight Zappa’s later bands were, they never reached the fantastic, apparently loose level of the line-ups featuring Duke and Underwood, both of whom can be heard on dozens of albums.
The Balance
How should the fascinating personality of Frank Zappa, with his enormous musical legacy, be understood? According to his biographer Barry Miles, as a bohemian, a natural outsider, with the conception of the artist as a romantic genius.
Zappa embraced irony and satire and was often cynical: about politicians, television evangelists and commercial mass culture, but also about hippie culture and drug addiction. He had no interest in intellectual debates.
Ultimately, his motto in life was the one expressed in the song Packard Goose from JOE’S GARAGE(1979):
“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is the best.”
For us, the period of Zappa’s career that began in 1973 with OVER-NITE SENSATION and more or less ended in the late 1970s is unquestionably his very best.
We saw Zappa and his band shine in Rotterdam on 28 September 1974, in an almost sold-out Sportpaleis Ahoy, six days after the concert in Helsinki that was immortalised on the second volume of the series of live recordings YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE.
The burning cigarette tucked between the guitar strings had something magical about it.
But truly unforgettable was the moment when, in the middle of an impressive guitar solo, Zappa completely unexpectedly and at lightning speed came to lie down on the stage. For perhaps ten seconds at most he continued playing on his back, then, in one fluid movement, sprang back onto his feet just as quickly and resumed the guitar solo.
The concert was in any case very special and unusual for this tour, because after the interval Zappa mainly improvised extensively on guitar.
OVER-NITE SENSATION remains, fifty years after its release, an album of great stature that stands solidly from beginning to end and never becomes boring for a second.
Wim Bot and Peter de Ruiter
With thanks to Erik Verhoef, musician and guitar teacher.
Originally published in Dutch in Music Magazine Heaven, autumn 2023 |
| Here I am with my friend Rob and Dweezil Zappa |
