There are a couple of big anniversaries happening in music right now. Perhaps the most obscure is the 50th anniversary of buying my first album. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas 1968, a not quite twelve version of myself went out and bought 'The White Album'. Being a double platter by the most popular group on the planet at the time, I remember it being rather expensive, perhaps eight to ten dollars. I loved it immediately.
Interesting, I didn't buy the other monumentally groundbreaking double album released just a month earlier, 'Electric Ladyland'. At that age, I wasn't a Hendrix fan; his music was too harsh, strange, atonal. Later, I became a huge admirer. Even later, learning to play the guitar, I began to understand the truly unique nature of the noise he made, trying to replicate some of the sounds and patterns, finding out just how experimental and groundbreaking he was.
Both double album now come in fancy deluxe editions, both must-haves for an old school music geek like myself. I bought the Hendrix first, simply because it is smaller and less expensive. Sooner or later I will manage the scratch for 'The White Album' box; it's too dear to my heart to pass by, and for the amount of material it's not grossly overpriced, like last year's 'St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'. The whole phenomenon has me thinking about the importance and place of the double album in rock history.
Let's define terms; I'm talking about double albums that are studio only, or in the rare case including significant live material debuted for the first time. I'm not talking about double live albums, although at some point I may return to that subject because it does contain may significant pieces of work, or greatest hits packages, even if there are unique songs included. This is a discussion of double albums created in the studio, longer continuous pieces spread over two long players.
The LP was only a dozen years old when both Bob Dylan and the Mothers issued double albums in 1966. The Dylan one came out first, but the Mothers was actually recorded first, in late 1965. They are both milestones , classic in their very different ways. Yet there is one big similarity; they are really three sided albums with a very loose fourth part.
Dylan has never sounded better than on 'Blonde on Blonde'. With two electric albums under his belt, he was past some of the earlier timing issues. Moving to Nashville to work with Bob Johnson for the first time, the first thirteen songs are all very strong, nearly every one a classic. It's only at the end, with 'Sad Eyes Lady of the Lowlands', that things stretch too much. It was a continuation of his folk ballad heritage, but it sounded like mud compared to the supercharged rock of the previous songs.
Dylan would do another double album a few years later, 'Self Portrait' in 1970. While it does have a few live tracks, I'll include it here, if for no other reason to show how lost Bob was during this period of time. The album is truly wretched; worse, the Bootleg series with tracks from this period that weren't used shows a complete lack of judgement of Dylan's part. There was plenty of good material, not to mention full sessions with Johnny Cash and George Harrison that could have made this a very good piece of work. Instead, he included too much middle of the road pop crap, truly uninspired.
Technically, there was another double studio album in 1975, 'The Basement Tapes'. While it has its merits, the inclusion of tracks by the Band alone makes the whole project confusing. If Dylan's management was trying to stop bootleggers, and the Basement Tapes were famously bootlegged for decades, the strange inclusions and exclusions on these two discs only added fuel to the bootlegging fire. Still, taken on its own merits, its a fine if unspectacular collection. Again, The Bootleg series decades later finally revealed just how powerful and strange these sessions really were.
The Mothers' album was a entirely different thing, the first real flowering of the genius that was Frank Zappa. Frank had done a bit of everything, from writing classical music to scoring low budget films. He had written doo wop and surf music, producing or writing a few minor hits. Eventually he purchased a studio, learning to engineer sound, but ran afoul of the local police. Running for the anonymity of Los Angeles, he fell in with the motley Mothers, a bar band.
Always filled with genuine plans for world domination, Zappa quickly turned the Mothers into his own freak laboratory. While abstaining from drugs of any sort except coffee and cigarettes,
Frank became a senior member of the Los Angeles burgeoning hippie scene, making friends with everyone from Jim Morrison to Brian Wilson. The band scuffled; the Mothers were always teetering on bankruptcy, not helped by Zappa's ever expanding group membership. Fortunately, they were seen by Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's old producer, who had just moved to a new label and was looking for talent.
Wilson thought that he had landed a blues band, sort of like Canned Heat. Henry Vestine, guitarist in the Mothers at the time, later became the long time-lead guitarist for Canned Heat, in between prison sentences. Zappa walked into the studio on the first day with complete scores for the Wrecking Crew, L.A.'s famous studio musicians, much to the amazement of all concerned. Typical of FZ, he was playing to the bandstand, and they immediately respected his talent.
The album is straighter than anything else Zappa did, but still pretty diverse, containing enough weirdness to hint at music to come. There are doo wop parodies and ironic love songs, as well as large does of pachuco humor, something that took me, an East Coast guy, years to understand. The album is a clarion call for all disaffected youth right from the opening track, 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy.' 'Who Are the Brain Police' still remains incredibly odd after more than fifty years.
Nearly all the relatively normal song structures are on the first two sides, leaving the second platter for the really far out material. 'Trouble Every Day' is a tough, nasty blues equal to anything by the Rolling Stones or Yardbirds, topical lyrics attacking white privilege even back then. 'It Can't Happen Here' and 'Help, I'm a Rock' shows how Frank rehearsed his band within an inch of their lives, being able to improvise in sync even on a vocal number. Each of these songs gets a chance to stretch out beyond the normal boundaries of the era.
The last side is where things get most experimental; Zappa rented a mountain of percussion instruments, inviting all the freaks into the studio late one night, conducting the unwashed mass as best he could. The result is somewhere between Varese and exactly what every parent in America warned their children about. Zappa managed to capture the moment before the hippie ethos became commercialized perfectly. He would never be so in vogue again.
Both the Mothers and Zappa later would release many more double and even triple album sets. The only other artist close to be as prolific as Frank was Prince, also quickly outstripping the record company's allotment for new product on a regular basis. "Uncle Meat' from 1968 was undoubtedly the Mother's finest moment. Typically breaking every mold, there are live cuts, but of new songs. One continuous mostly instrumental collage of classical electronic music, it still remains largely ahead of it's time.
'200 Motels' in 1972 went even farther, all new music, recorded live, much of it with a symphony orchestra. It would set a pattern for much of Zappa's career, using live albums to reduce the glut of new material. 'Roxy & Elsewhere' fro 1975 was typical, two discs of mostly new material, an old song or two in a radical new arrangement mixed in. As always, FZ was breaking more rules than he was keeping.
After getting his three (of maybe four ) disc set 'Läther' rejected in 1977 by the record company, Zappa sued, as always. He won, as always, but was forced to become his own record distribution, probably the best decision for all involved. A steady stream of totally new live or studio multi album sets emerged, even past when he died in 1993. The pool of unreleased material at times seems endless, even if the Zappa estate is in disarray right now, the children fighting each other over the debts Frank's widow left behind after her death.
No other artist left behind as large a catalogue in such a short time, in as many different genres, including a few that didn't exist and still don't outside the Zappa universe. His artistic life was an attempt to record everything that affected him, with only his own experience as a reference. It can be hard to follow, difficult to digest. Many find it not worth the effort. I think Frank Zappa was a genius, only comparable to Sun Ra and Prince in terms of the scope of his achievement.
Dylan is still around, teetering between self-parody and legend, touring forever like Willie Nelson. The spark seems to have finally left. I don't blame him; it's been a long, sometimes tough job, being the spokes person for a generation. I certainly wouldn't want the position. Robert Zimmerman seems a fundamentally private person who has been forced to hide behind the façade of Bob Dylan to survive and function. There is a lot of great music out there, and more than a few mistakes.
Zappa can't be judged the same way. In fact, he can't be judged at all, everything being too abstract and personal to put into perspective, except the very earliest material. That applies the most to 'Freak Out', a brilliant take on a culture that most of the world didn't even know existed. Frank always said that he was an anthropologist first; what he failed to mention was that the study was of his life and times, his experiences and influences. Make of it what you will, or ignore it. The choice is yours.
Between these two mighty artists, the double album, warts and all, was born. It is an excess, a chance for an artist to clear the closet, let off steam, do weird things, expand the sonic horizon. The form remains controversial to this day, creating many of the most important landmark albums but also considered an artistic indulgent by many. I confess to loving them, a direct result of my first purchase back in 1968.
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