[music] Frank Zappa, Läther (1996)

Rykodisc
Total Running Time - 163:05

Personnel
Frank Zappa - guitar, vocals; George Duke - keyboards; Terry Bozzio, Chester Thompson, Ralph Humphrey, Jim Gordon - drums; Patrick O'Hearn, Roy Estrada, James "Bird Legs" Youman, Tom Fowler - bass; Ruth Underwood, Emil Richards - percussion; and many others...

1. Regyptian Strut
2. Naval Aviation in Art?
3. A Little Green Rosetta
4. Duck Duck Goose
5. Down in de Dew
6. For the Young Sophisticate
7. Tryin' to Grow a Chin
8. Broken Hearts Are for Assholes
9. The Illinois Enema Bandit
10. Lemme Take You to the Beach
11. Revised Music for Guitar and Low-Budget Orchestra
12. RDNZL
13. Honey, Don't You Want a Man Like Me?
14. The Black Page #1
15. Big Leg Emma
16. Punky's Whips
17. Flambay
18. The Purple Lagoon
19. Pedro's Dowry
20. Läther
21. Spider of Destiny
22. Duke of Orchestral Prunes
23. Filthy Habits
24. Titties & Beer
25. The Ocean Is the Ultimate Solution
26. The Adventures of Greggery Peccary
27. Regyptian Strut
28. Leather Goods
29. Revenge of the Knick Knack People
30. Time Is Money


Since becoming a Zappa fan, I've always thought that there was no simple way to describe him, that there was no one album that I could point to that represented the many sides of his music. After buying Läther, I realized that I was wrong. It's got it all. Munchkin vocals, off-color scatological ditties, classical stylings, stellar musicianship, and Zappa's endearingly deep sarcasm surface throughout this 3-CD set. This collection was also my introduction to "The Adventures of Greggary Peccary", which comes very close to hitting all of those bases in the space of twenty-one minutes AND quotes the theme of "Louie Louie" in the process. Läther also contains what may be the definitive version of the oft-recorded "RNDZL", featuring an absolutely brilliant piano solo from George Duke, who shines wherever he appears. Patrick O'Hearn contributes an impressive acoustic bass workout on "The Ocean Is The Ultimate Solution", and Terry Bozzio shows his considerable talents throughout the entire two and a half hours of music, which includes the infamous polyrhythmic-drum-solo-with-a-melody known as "The Black Page #1".

Läther also represents a sort of personal epiphany for me. Listening to this album, and especially "Greggary Peccary", has shed some light on how Zappa composes music. He routinely ignores the verse-chorus repetition inherent in popular music, which is fairly obvious from most of his work, but in this context, I finally started to understand what he uses in place of it. The first guess would be that Zappa uses a more classical style of composition, but even that requires some repetition. More often than not, Zappa pieces will dwell on a theme for a short period of time, and then move on. With the addition of a story line, you can see that he seems to approach a musical piece as a narrative. A short story or a novel wouldn't keep repeating sentences or chapters over and over, and so Zappa eschews repetition for the sense of the greater story. I'm not sure if this is the same as the idea of conceptual continuity that Zappa has often talked about, but it certainly puts the larger body of his work into a more coherent context.

The history of this sprawling piece of work is also worth noting. Läther was originally delivered to Warner Brothers as a four-record set in 1977. They refused to release it as such, and after a whole lot of legal wrangling, which is documented in the CD booklet, Zappa played the entire program over the radio, instructing his fans to record it free of charge. Most of the material eventually found its way out as the albums Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt, Live in New York, and Orchestral Favorites, but has never been released in its original form until now, thanks to the efforts of Frank's wife Gail, and the people at Zappa's studio, the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. We should all be grateful for their labors, as this album represents the late composer as no other album has before.