Product Description

Before becoming obsessed with sex, politics and the Synclavier, Frank Zappa was a performer of great whimsy, who here, on his second album, was singing about such topics as fruitsand vegetables while also displaying a developing critical attitude toward American social mores. Dense with musical references from "Louie Louie" to Holst's "The Planets", ABSOLUTELY FREE is a testament to the young Zappa's awesome musical breadth. These Mothers of Invention lack the precision of Zappa's later combos, but give a firm R&B grounding to his experimentation. ABSOLUTELY FREE includes the classic "Brown Shoes Don't Make It", a biting parody of suburban American values, along with forgotten masterpieces like "Call Any Vegetable", a tune pointing out the ease with which we can become in tune with our little green buddies.

Track Listing

1. Plastic People
2. Duke Of Prunes
3. Amnesia Vivace
4. Duke Regains His Chops
5. Call Any Vegetable
6. Invocation And Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin
7. Soft Sell Conclusion
8. Big Leg Emma
9. Why Don'tcha Do Me Right
10. America Drinks
11. Status Back Baby
12. Uncle Bernie's Farm
13. Son Of Suzy Creamcheese
14. Brown Shoes Don't Make It
15. America Drinks And Goes Home

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163191 in Music
• Released on: 2002-06-24
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Limited Edition, Import

Customer Reviews

The Duke Meets his Match
The swift single-album follow-up to Freak Out, setting the pace for FZ releases which has barely faltered to this day (the latest being the long-awaited "Trance-Fusion", released in October 2006), almost thirteen years after his death. More difficult to define than its predecessor, Absolutely Free is a curious mix of short "teen" vocal numbers touching on subjects ranging from high-school sensibilities to the commercialisation of Christmas, alongside several extended pieces of improvisation. It kicks off with the brilliant Plastic People, a spiteful put-down of an apathetic and robotic public-at-large. It's a shame no punk band ever covered that song. A Sex Pistols version would have been very interesting. Then we have the "Duke" trilogy, tracks 2, 3 and 4, originally numbered 2a, b and c on the vinyl LP. The "prune" in question is nothing to do with the fruit, but emanates from a restaurant confrontation between FZ and a well-known Western film actor, where the latter first encounters Frank, vocalises his disgust and, finally, regains his composure. Instrumentally, the band is now augmented with sax, clarinet, keyboards and a second drummer / percussionist, which illustrates the direction Frank was already taking, away from the confines of the standard blues/rock/ballad format. Frank pinches the theme of Jupiter from Holst's Planets Suite for the intro to Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin (i.e. Mrs. Zappa), which stretches out to several minutes of guitar/clarinet/sax interplay. The CD also includes "Big Leg Emma" and "Why Don't You Do Me Right?", the A and B sides respectively of a single that was released at the time and not part of the original LP. Nice to have but in some ways they spoil the album - the songs don't quite "belong" here - although, admittedly, FZ did approve the CD release and they have at least been placed between what were the original sides 1 and 2. The "second half" is bracketed by two arrangements of the same song - "America Drinks" and the closing number "America Drinks and Goes Home" - a device we were to become used to with Frank's albums, where familiar, sometimes very short, passages pop up now and again throughout his entire ouvre. The former is a kind of streetwise ballad sung a la Tony Bennett, and the closer is essentially the same, delivered in mock inebriation with a raucous outro of clinking glasses and party hollering. In the penultimate piece, Brown Shoes Don't Make It, FZ manages to sandwich together a treatise on American social paranoia and local government corruption (and not for the last time in his career). So - a worthwhile purchase, deserving its five stars but not quite as attention-grabbing as Freak Out and not as entertaining as the next release ... but that's another story.

Could be Zappas Secret masterpiece
While his earlier "Freak Out" veered between straightforward parody and improvised freakiness, this is neither one nor the other, but something of an amalgamation of the two styles. The music on Absolutely Free is grouped into several "song cycles" which mix relatively straightforward song structures with some very off-the wall improv (or apparent improv made from tape-trickery). Most of it teeters dangerously on a precipice between incredibly virtuouso musicianship and slapdash amateurishness.

Take the first track as a great example of the album as a whole. "Plastic People" begins with a drum roll and announcement "Ladies and gentleman, the president of the United States" before "the President" launches into a "doo-doo-doo" version of "Louie Louie". This theme warps and bends before the refrain "Plastic people! Oh, baby, you're such a drag!" is repeated twice. We then get an adapted verse from "Louie" once more, then the refrain, distorted before a central meltdown in which Zappa namechecks trendy San Fransisco clubs. The refrains are further slowed and distorted, sped up again and then we hear the extended play-out, in which disembodied voices float over a primitive beat and a kind of mariachi trumpet effect. The statements during the song are both satirical and hysterical; "I don't know if I'm tired of you, honey, it's your hairspray or something!" and "A prune is not a vegetable, cabbage is a vegetable, makes it OK". The singing is hardly Beach-Boys quality (we get three or four freaks who seem barely able to keep time) and a galloping modernist musical theme seems to punctuate the proceedings, which is repeated quickly, slowly and again with a stuttering intensity. In the quieter sections, Zappa's guitar picks out Stravinsky-like melodic lines both beautiful and subtle.

The rest of the record substitutes prunes, ketchup, vegetables, Stravinsky, adverts, Stockhausen, doo-wop, wigged-out psych, loyal plastic robots and dangerous satire for any of the normal aspects of records of the time.

Could this be the first record were the makers didn't care what you thought about it? You get the impression they made it for themselves, even down to the spontaneous laughter which seems to punctuate or end several of the tracks. In my opinion, this is the closest Zappa ever got to the ugly-beautiful aesthetic he was aiming for. It certainly has a lot more punky charm than later, more polished efforts.

"Call any Vegetable, call it on the phone!"
Who else but Frank Zappa could devote almost half of an album to "your friends in the vegetable kingdom"? Due to his proliferous output not all of Zappa's music is to everyone's taste, but this album is very accessible, not too radical a change from the preceding 'Freak Out!', although it doesn't contain kickers like 'Trouble Every Day' and 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy'.

That said, the sequence from 'The Duke of Prunes' to 'Soft Cell Conclusion', about the human relationship to the vegetable, how to make contact with it, and then how to groove together "at the church of your choice", is as hilarious and groovy as can be. But still the cultural criticism isn't far behind in the great tracks 'Plastic People' and 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It'.

It's nothing like 'Joe's Garage' or 'Sheik Yerbouti', both having a firmer base among the mainstream public, but it is definately worth a listen to, and exemplary of the diversity of Frank Zappa. Again, there's a lot of intricate and intruiging music that transgresses any genre definition, and a lot of welcome humorous silliness that I really miss in music today.