The Composer: ’73 – ‘74

Zappa always seemed to encourage ideas from his band members, collect them and mould them together into his own pieces. Many of the musicians who worked with him became angry, and perhaps a bit bitter, and accused him of stealing their ideas. As Motorhead explained: “Frank’s special talent was for taking bits and pieces from all over the place and incorporating them into his work.” Tom Fowler continued: “He gets too much credit for the things the guys around him contributed.” Kaylan pointed out “his ability to take the best from his musicians and recycle it and put it out again ... as ‘Frank Zappa music’” [Miles p. 230]. As Miles explains, “He saw himself in part as a journalist, reporting on life as he saw it and he believed that anything the band said or did in the privacy of the dressing room could – and should – be shouted from the rooftops” [p.234]. However, the one constant was that he always made sure to use a third person narrative or make someone else sing the songs because as much as he loved talking about the experiences of others he couldn’t directly speak of his.

In 1973 the newest incarnation of The Mothers recorded with Tina Turner and The Ikettes. Zappa’s compositions were becoming less social commentary and more explicit, dumbed down humor. And the more faith he lost in ‘freaking out’ the less revelatory were his lyrics.

For his album Over-Nite Sensation (1973) Zappa wrote two songs that really stand out as a turning point. Dinah-Moe Hum, which is about a woman who bets Zappa $40 that he can’t make her come, and Dirty Love, which is about a narrator who treats a groupie solely as a sex object and she ends up having sex with a poodle. Other than trying to appeal to a wider audience with his raw humor the fact was that ever since the jail time he served in ’65 for the ‘suggestive tapes’ he made it his mission in life to exercise his freedom of speech to the fullest extent.

However, the album did feature I’m the Slime, along the lines of Trouble Every Day's social commentary, where Zappa comments on television brainwashing the country into a group of zombies who simply do as they’re told.

The tour which followed, once again with a new lineup (largely instrumental this time), was not as pleasing to Zappa as he had hoped. He found the musicians to be extremely boring and his constant problem would become that "he wanted skilled musicians, but he wanted them to behave like a teenage rock n’ roll band so that he could have more vicarious experiences to write about” [p.273]. With music that wasn’t very rock and his stringent policy on drugs he was unlikely to ever find any candidates who fit the bill.

Apostrophe(‘) came in ’74 and unfortunately for Zappa it became evident that thanks to “the combination of dumbed-down humor with extremely sophisticated playing ... the music was often overlooked” [p. 239].