Zoot Allures

Background

Just before Halloween, 1976, Frank navigated around legal disputes with his former manager Herb Cohen to release this album, which appeared on the regular Warner Bros. label while DiscReet was hung up in the court hassles. Only slightly over a year after wrapping up an unsuccessful lawsuit against London’s Royal Albert Hall over the 200 Motels concert that had been vetoed back in ‘71, Frank sued Herb for embezzling money with his attorney brother. (The orchestral-piece title “Mo ‘n Herb’s Vacation” refers to Herb spending Frank’s money on his own stuff.) Shortly after the suit was filed in the summer of ‘76, work began on Night of the Iron Sausage at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. It was to be a double album, presumably containing some of the early to mid-‘70s material that would eventually be heard on the four records resulting from the fragmentation of Läther. Frank eventually decided that Night should be a single album called Zoot Allures. Once it was completed, the Record Plant wouldn’t let him have the master tapes unless Warner Bros. idemnified the studio against any lawsuit that Herb might decide to file as a byproduct of his battles with Frank. Warner consented to this, but only if Frank idemnified them as well. He threw his hands up and had the album mastered from the half-speed safety copy he’d fortunately brought home.

The title plays on the French exclamation zut alors! (akin to “dammit!”). This is a continuation of the trick in the album title The Grand Wazoo, which re-spells the French word for “bird,” oiseau (“Grand Wazoo” = “Big Bird”?). The wordplay on Zoot Allures also cleverly depicts the first two letters of “Zappa” as the title’s initials. A similar prank will be pulled on the cover of Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.
     Posing on the front cover like a basic rock group, in congruity with the album’s mostly simplex (for Zappa) music, are bassist Patrick O’Hearn, drummer Terry Bozzio, Frank and keyboardist Eddie Jobson. Pat and Eddie are being used as props; they don’t even play on the album. They’re probably in the picture because it was taken around the time Frank was getting his late ‘76 touring band together. To fortify the theme of the contrived sexual presentation of oneself (more on this later), Frank’s pants are incredibly tight; on the back cover, he’s the only one who’s really changed his pose, bending outward at both knees to relieve the pressure. “See how ridiculous this sort of fashion is?” is implied. “Later That Night” from the Ruben album is called to mind: “There’s no room to breathe in here!” In “Stuff Up the Cracks” later on that record, the song’s heartbroken character imagines asphyxiating himself. Gas and the strange ideals attached to modern relationships definitely arise on Zoot Allures.
     The cover’s pants-bulges are zoot allures themselves. Zoot suits were fashionable with black jazz musicians and their fans in the 1940s. A decade later, the free physical expressions and “primal rhythms” of black entertainers were alluring to sexually repressed teenagers. Frank writes in his 1968 essay “The New Rock”: “From the very beginning, the real reason Mr. & Mrs. Clean White America objected to [early rock and roll] music was the fact that it was performed by black people. There was always a danger that one night -- maybe in the middle of summer, in a little pink party dress -- Janey or Suzy might be overwhelmed by the lewd, pulsating jungle rhythms and do something to make their parents ashamed.” This fits in with Zoot Allures’ concept of stifled sexuality coming out in odd ways. “Wonderful Wino” even mentions a zoot suit.
     Terry’s wearing an Angels shirt, advertising the baseball team; it’s perhaps just a handy coincidence that Punky Meadows from the rock group Angel will be jeered in “Punky’s Whips” during the upcoming tour, observing both confused sexuality and bondage accoutrements. The Japanese text on the cover combines word bits to roughly form “Frank Zappa,” although names in Japan aren’t really written by joining phonics together in such a straightforward manner; they’re of a more pictorial nature. The writing is Hanko in style, a form used for personal signatures.

Studio engineer Davey Moire eventually takes over the lead vocals in "Wind Up Workin' in a Gas Station," occasionally harmonizing with himself. His high voice goes well with the energetic music, conveying the image of one child singing to another about their futures. On its outer lyrical layer, the song reprises the jabs at Nixon’s recession in “Can’t Afford No Shoes” from One Size Fits All, proclaiming that a college graduate won’t necessarily get a good job. But Davey’s sardonic, growling line “Pumpin’ the gas every night” is a frightening reminder of the Californian concentration camps that Frank mentions in the Money libretto notes. ”Show me your thumb if you’re really dumb” is pure sarcasm: “Thumb” your nose at people who call you dumb because you’ve wound up at a gas station. Davey then sings Frank’s sarcastically stated encouragement not to be a moron who contemplates no alternative to the prescribed way of life (recalling “Be a jerk/Go to work” from “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” on Absolutely Free). The listener’s told that he “oughta know now, all your education/won’t help ya no-how.” As Davey repeats the title refrain, we realize that he’s taken over the singing just to set Frank up for a closer, louder vocal. His deep voice is mixed in front of everything else: “Manny de Camper vants to buy some vite [wants to buy some white].” The German accent furthers the Nazi subtext. One initially thinks of white gas (propane, which portable lamps and stoves run on), but he actually wants some white fish (a Jewish delicacy); Frank’s line is followed by the falsetto exclamation “fish!” (at the same time the backing vocals are singing the word “gas,” from the repeated song title).

”Black Napkins” was recorded live in Osaka, Japan on 2/3/76 (which perhaps explains the Japanese side-motif on the album cover). The wah-wah pedal’s eventually utilized in tandem with Frank’s uncanny neck-picking to make the guitar sound like an overheated science-fiction-movie computer; the sound returns (as bubbles?) in “Ship Ahoy.”
     In Ljubliana, Yugoslavia on 11/11/75, Frank introduced an early version of “Black Napkins” to the audience by saying, “This is an instrumental song. It’s a tender, slow, moving, ‘ballad’ sort of song that carries with it the implied message that the complete woman must also have an asshole.” In the context of the album: The “perfect woman” from whom men are trained to search isn’t real, and they’ll be let down by the very thing that should be turning them on (natural humanity, with all its so-called imperfections). This subtext anticipates “You never go doody/That’s what you think” in the album’s closer, “Disco Boy.” In spite of seemingly connecting to these ideas by describing toilet paper, the song’s title wasn’t concocted until later in the month of that spoken intro. It’s called “Black Napkins” because for Thanksgiving dinner, ‘75, Frank and his band ate at a venue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that served hardly edible food, sealing the comical atrocity by providing napkins that were black.

The lyrics in “The Torture Never Stops” are said to have been originally intended as exaggerated ribbings at Captain Beefheart for his somewhat narcissistic lifestyle and lack of consistent sanitary habits. When the song was first performed in the spring of ‘75 at Claremont College during the Bongo Fury tour, it was called “Why Doesn’t Somebody Get Him a Pepsi?”. By the time Frank laid down this Zoot Allures vocal, it had grown to represent much more in terms of some undefined evil entity. One can solidify it as a politician, a music journalist (cf. Thing-Fish) or the embodiment of the real authorities who don’t get on the news, the monsters behind this psychosexual concentration camp. The reek that even makes the stones choke is another sly reference to poisonous air, not to mention Jewish dietary customs (raw pork). “Guns and the likes of every tool of pain” are included among outlets of misappropriated sexuality, recalling Frank’s past lyrics about phallic extensions.
     Besides a “tiny light from a window hole” (which makes one wonder if “City of Tiny Lites,” a song about Los Angeles on Sheik Yerbouti, might not name the city as a center of this oppression), the atmosphere never gets a break, not a single unbroken shaft of sunlight; nor does the Night of the Iron Sausage, the era in which America’s denizens are battered by misleadings that snuff their self-esteem and direct their sexual energies toward machines (cf. Joe’s Garage) and masochism. If the torture ever stopped, no one would let himself be groomed and shaped like a poodle, feeding the money machine like a good little pet -- much less act dumb to appear sexually appealing (“Find Her Finer”) or feel the need to get drunk and fervently attend dance clubs (“Wonderful Wino” and “Disco Boy”).
     The opening stanzas before each verse (and prior to the guitar solo) are backed by orgasmic, partly pained female moans and squeals. The torture never stops; even during a guitar solo, the male listener is reminded of sex, his own insecurities about “performing,” and that these cries frustrate him more than they should; they’re a natural, common bit of humanity, after all. We can assume that the orgasmic screams of the girls (it’s Gail Zappa and a friend; the first grunt’s made by the friend) are included to reveal to the listener how uptight his culture’s made him (or her, for that matter). “Why does this torture you? Isn’t it a natural sound?” Frank’s asking. Some of the squeals sound like actual howls of pain; the listener’s also asked why pain and control represent sex. Additional sexual/tortured cries from the same “evening’s work” (Frank’s words) in his bedroom surface as creepy glimpses back to the dungeons of despair in “Rat Tomago” (“tomago” is “egg” in Japanese) on Sheik Yerbouti. The song comes after “Jones Crusher” and is followed by “Bobby Brown”: songs about damaged genitals. On the Baby Snakes soundtrack, “Jones Crusher” is immediately followed by “Disco Boy.” (Then again, maybe the revisited shrieks in “Rat Tomago” are just meant to be the cries of a girl who’s realized that someone’s eating a rat omelette.)
     In 1977, Frank told Guitar Player’s Steve Rosen that “the thing that sounds like a slide guitar on ‘The Torture Never Stops’ is actually a fretless... It’s different than a regular guitar. You don’t push the strings to bend them; you move them back and forth like violin-type vibrato, which is a funny movement to get used to. But you can play barre chords on it. It’s fun.”
     Frank sings an elongated verse at the end, wondering if the victims are “zeroes someone painted.” This recalls Nanook’s frozen (cultural) wasteland. He sums up both his eclectic music and his lyrical attempts to expose buried truths: “Everything that’s ever been/That’s what’s the deal we’re dealin’ in.”

The girl’s death blow is dealt by her being cloned in artificial form, her own packaged “perfect” image, as “Ms. Pinky” stomps in. Frank parodies Van Morrison’s “Gloria” by spelling out “P-i-n-k-y,” and then “K-Y” (Jelly; a lubricating agent) is snuck in there. This is a song about, according to Frank’s words to Miles in 1976, “a lonely-person device. We have this fan in Finland called Eric... [His favorite porn magazine] had ads for lonely-person devices. It was even worse than I had imagined. Not only is it a head, it’s the size of a child’s head. The throat is sponge rubber, and it’s got a vibrator in it with a battery pack and a two-speed motor. Sticking out of its neck is a nozzle with a squeeze-bulb that makes the throat contract.” (The doll really was priced at $69.95, according to Frank in other interviews.) So the original sides 1 and 2 both end with masturbation (the “Disco Boy” goes home alone, engaging in “disco love” with himself), book-ending the record with the result of/solution to frustration. This album’s a Weeny Sandwich of its own.

Donnie Vliet, who’s credited with blowing the harmonica in “Ms. Pinky” and “Find Her Finer,” is of course Captain Beefheart, going by his real name.

“Find Her Finer” opens the album’s second half with remarks about how idiocy has become the accepted norm. The prospective gas attendant at the beginning of the first half is sarcastically being encouraged to fulfill the “dumb” stereotype laid on him. The occasional silent-beat vocals come from Ruben Ladron de Guevara (of the actual Ruben & the Jets, formed long after the Mothers’ album came out and whose LP For Real was produced by Frank). The line “The universe is nowhere to start” vocalizes the difference between the cover concepts of the prior year’s One Size Fits All (the motif having been that the universe can hold everyone comfortably) and Zoot Allures (with its spoofy pandering to consumers of sexually oriented media). The listener’s sardonically encouraged to “rap like a mummy ‘till you finally unwind her” (“rap” = “wrap,” in the sense of a mummy’s wrapping, which can be unwound). “See who designed her” correlates the human woman to the manufactured rubber head in the last song. “Ground mummy” was the name of a nineteenth-century spice, adding a further pun.
     After admitting that he’s probably offended some listeners (similar to how he opened side 1), more wordplay’s heard in “wiser fool,” which is an oxymoron.

Xenochronicity (called “experimental re-synchronization” in the Sheik Yerbouti liner notes) made its debut in “Friendly Little Finger.” The guitar solo was recorded in a different time, place and musical context than the other instrumental parts.

The brass at the end of "Friendly Little Finger" is playing the traditional gospel song “Bringing in the Sheaves,” recalling the Salvation Army’s attempts at helping alcoholics quit. This leads of course into “Wonderful Wino,” co-written with Jeff Simmons in 1970. The macho line “Boy, she looked over at me and she raised her thumb” follows up on the opening song’s lyrics. “I stink like a hog” recalls the unappealing meal in “The Torture Never Stops.” The dancer expression “Watch me, now!” (taken from the Dave Clark Five’s old hit “Do You Love Me”) is spoofed, as it will be in “Bobby Brown”; it’s curious that the lyric has nothing to do with dancing either time. “Eat the label” is also sung in “Baby, Take Your Teeth Out,” a song about a gummed blow job on Them or Us. (Ms. Pinky’s deeds undoubtedly feel like gum jobs.) “Eat the label” could be a stealthy Zappa expression about his music; any attempt to brand it is swallowed up. The wino pisses on the front lawn of a woman with her hair up in curlers, like how the black guy in “Uncle Remus” smashed the racist lawn ornaments of white Beverly Hills residents.
     A different studio version of “Wonderful Wino,” recorded in 1973 and featuring Ricky Lancelotti’s hyperactive vocals, contained the same line about the lawn as this rendition; but the even earlier live version from shows with Flo & Eddie went, “A roller-headed lady caught me weedling [or wheedling: begging] on her lawn.” The wino could’ve been urinating or loitering.
     Originally released by Jeff Simmons on his 1970 solo album Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up on Zappa’s Straight Records, the song was temporarily retitled “Wino Man” when it was performed by the Mothers the following year. The title song from Simmons’ album was also redone by Frank for Joe’s Garage, Act I. Although prominently depicting a world in which music has been made illegal, that story concerns a character whose life is wrecked in nearly every imaginable way due to society’s rampant warping of sexuality.

The live instrumental “Zoot Allures,” rumored to have been recorded at the same Japanese concert as “Black Napkins” (although the songs have different bass players if one goes by the back-cover credits), incorporates a striking harp part played by Lu Ann Neil. The original ending can be heard as “Duck Duck Goose” on Läther and “Ship Ahoy” on Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar Some More. A November 1981 performance of “Zoot Allures” is resynchronized over separately recorded music to render the solo section of “Truck Driver Divorce” on Them or Us.

In 1977, Frank told New Music Express that “’Disco Boy’ came about because we were in Denmark and we went to a place there called the Disc Club, and it was really poot. It was so make-believe sophisticated that it was embarrassing. The place was decorated like a playboy-type living room would sort of be like—low-boy chairs and snackettes on the table. And everybody drinks and dances to these robot-beat records...” The masturbation reference casts a curious light on the line “Find her blinder” in this half’s opener; blindness has been superstition’s reprimand for self-stimulation for ages. We can easily discern “Disco Boy” as being circular, i.e. repetitious like the average pop song. The fur trapper in “Nanook Rubs It” is blinded by urine-soaked snow that’s rubbed into his eyes with a “vigorous circular motion” (female masturbation and circularity). Just before the solo, “The Torture Never Stops” contains the echoing “Well...well...” of “Nanook Rubs It.”
     Those who watch the movie Baby Snakes will discover Frank singing most of “Disco Boy” to a young girl named Angel, tying into the Zoot Allures front cover and of course “Punky’s Whips” (not to mention Angel the cross-dresser cited in “Broken Hearts Are For Assholes” and Warren's girlfriend Angel in the Baby Snakes film).