2. I Ain't Got No Heart
3. Who Are The Brain Police
4. Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder
5. Motherly Love
6. How Could I Be Such A Fool
7. Wowie Zowie
8. You Didn't Try To Call Me
9. Any Way The Wind Blows
10. I'm Not Satisfied
11. You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here
12. Trouble Every Day
13. Help I'm A Rock
14. It Can't Happen Here
15. Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet
Listening to this album within the context of this list, I can more fully appreciate just how incredibly bizarre this album is. I can't imagine what your average record buyer in 1966 would've possibly thought as he put on this thing. Hell, even I wasn't sure what was going on when I heard it 40 years later.
What really endears this album to me is the sheer audacity of the whole thing. For one, he released it as a double album in an era when double albums were still very rare. I think the album ended up costing around $30,000 or something. On an album that clearly has very little commercial potential, especially in 1966. And this was his debut album! How on earth did he get away with this?
Another thing that strikes me is how sudden and upfront this record is. Most of the time (and especially in this era), bands develop their sound and image over their first few albums. Not so here. Zappa emerges from the womb fully formed, complete with goatee. The strange instrumentation, the random spoken asides, and the mocking of pop culture are all here from the start, and they would follow Frank for his entire career.
But enough waffling, on to the album! It's another concept album, with a bit more focus than the Kinks' earlier effort: It's a satirical observation of American pop culture, either directly attacked in sneering protest songs or mocked in bizarre pastiches of brain-dead pop music. Songs like 'Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder' are hilarious in their sheer banality. It's like '50s doo wop as sung by aliens or something. 'Wowie Zowie' is even better, taking the most puerile lyrics and setting them to an incredibly poppy xylophone-flavored arrangement. The liner notes make some comment about this song being designed to attract the 12 year old market or something, and it totally works in a completely hilarious way. Zappa, you clever bastard, you.
The harder edged songs are really something as well. 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy' is one of the more blistering countercultural attacks on mainstream society, along with a rockin' kazoo part (in fact, there are kazoos all over this album! It certainly suits it, I think). 'Trouble Every Day' is even better, a sort of Dylan-esque diatribe against the media's handling of events like the Watts Riot that inspired the song. It's a fairly standard blues rock number and surprisingly the most 'normal' sounding song of the whole album.
This album gets weird in the last third, though. 'Help I'm A Rock' is this weird sort of repetitive groove that has like 10 voices speaking some insane wall of gibberish, and it just gets weirder from there. 'It Can't Happen Here' is like if a barbershop quartet took a shitload of drugs, and all of this culminates in the 12 minute slice of madness that is 'The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet'. Interesting stuff, but it starts to drag on after a while. It wouldn't take too long for everyone else to get on the psychedelic freakout train, though.
While I wouldn't say it's his greatest album, it's always been one of my favorites, and it's one of the few records that remains brilliantly baffling to this day. 10/10
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